An Awful Lot of Books (19 page)

Works about animals, children, railway, mountains, tropical diseases, morality, Olden Times, the ‘nineties, the ’twenties and the ‘thirties - all subjects which used to be the prerogative of a knowing group of specialists have been so over-run by such an amateur weight of hobby scribblers or pauthors (part-time authors) that the poor specialists are driven to more and more abstruse extremes. It is no good keeping a terrier or a parrot any longer and communicating the joys of your relationship - it has to be a lion cub or at least an otter. And so forth. All this is quite apart from the welter of observation which falls into the loosely generic category of ‘life’. In this one finds every other childhood; every adolescent yearning and every nostalgic ramble from the bye-ways of old age. I have not yet been able to find anyone who, under sufficient pressure, hasn’t admitted to writing verse of some sort some time in their lives, and the phrases ‘starting on, getting down to, trying to finish, a novel’ are such a recurrent cry that they generate no more interest than do people announcing the progress of their ‘flu.

No wonder the British public seem so unappreciative and inert about current thoughts; they simply haven’t got the time to spare from their own writing to read the books that contain it. It has nothing whatever to do with age, or sex, or professional occupation - everybody has had, or wants to set about having experiences in order to write about them. Hale old admirals and brigadiers knock up vast quantities of verse about wild flowers, the weather and foxhunting (Laurie Lee, when judging a poetry competition, received about four hundred poems from a General all about the hooves ringing out on frosty roads, etc., and remarked that the General seemed to suffer from a slight case of Tallyhosis); gloomy young men, consumed with boredom at the banality of life and the cruelty of their (hopeless) situation in it, write novels about gloomy young men consumed with boredom, etc. Intrepid women describe journeys of breathless discomfort (three children, a budgie, a Siamese cat and husband starting afresh in Strange Lands). Kindly old clergymen produce interminable biographies of the more wicked Roman emperors or any other ancient tyrant who takes their fancy. Tidy old ladies keep finding letters of some ancestor in the bottom of a trunk. Frustrated young women with one child, whose marriage is going through a sticky stage, write novels about frustrated young women whose marriage, etc…

Anybody at all over seventy is liable to write their memoirs on the basis that however dull their life has been, it has been going on for a long while and it is high time someone else had to endure it. Eager young men write operas (music and book) based upon
Bleak House
,
War and Peace
,
Middlemarch
, or any other unwieldy classic. Everybody who was a) unhappy at school, b) fought through the war, c) was brought up in any other country but this one, d) whose parents were not both English (‘My father was English and perfectly dull and conventional. He never understood my mother, who was Armenian and a marvellous person. If she did not want to do the washing up, she simply dropped the tray on the kitchen floor. I shall always remember my father’s lack of emotional response as he cleared up the mess, and she stood laughing at him with unconquerable gaiety’): all these people write about all this. Quite a lot of people write plays - about Mary Stuart, Alexander the Great, cosy eccentric families living in the Home Counties and persons so symbolical that they defy description. Hundreds of people write children’s books which, like plays, they erroneously think are ‘easier than novels’. There is almost no inanimate object which has not been endowed with a nauseating personality in this medium not to mention the horses, bunnies, tigers and gnomic characters who abound.

In fact, nowhere in the world is there such a bulk of literary endeavour. When the typewriters give out, they write in exercise books, and they are all of them intent upon publication - thousands and thousands of them pouring in to the publishers and agents, to magazines and newspapers in such quantity that on the receiving end all but the steadiest literary judgements are unhinged. Many publishers get over a thousand typescripts a year, and have to employ a team of readers to deal with them, and if undeserving works slip through the net and get published, nobody can be blamed - on the whole, only ten or twelve per cent, of what is offered is accepted. The rest circulates with random restlessness from house to house and often from agent to agent - affording an honest living to many young professional writers who cannot live upon their writing and are paid to read scripts. By the time one gets a script whose pages are spattered with egg, sugar from bath buns, shreds of ham, little pieces of fern and tiny squashed flies, not to mention biscuit crumbs, cigarette ash, feathers and soot, you know that in spite of being unpublished it has been worth its weight in snacks and fags to half a dozen aspiring writers, one of whom may be really good. So in a mysterious roundabout way it has served its purpose.

And then there is another comforting thought. Out of all the amateur thousands, emerge those few who are necessary and interesting for the continuation of English literature: a great many people have discovered that they can write by writing; therefore the chance that this massive eccentricity (very few people indeed find writing fun) will yield something remarkable is there for all of us - the publisher, the agent, the reader and even the writer. The facts are that what with the English language and the freedom that all those wanting to express an opinion have had for many years now to despise, ridicule and shout about the national traits of their country-men, we have produced a quantity and quality of poetry and prose which is perhaps our largest single influence throughout the rest of the world. The monkeys would have to type very hard indeed to reach - let alone stay in - the same place. In any case, as a vulgar point of evolution, they really ought to start with exercise books.