Memoirs of a Private Man (19 page)

I had taken it. I had cancelled the press-cutting agency subscription and bullied eager young ladies in my publishers' offices not to send anything
at all
– good or bad. I found it a tremendous help. But for
The Grove of Eagles
research had been so extensive that I was ready to jump on anybody who dared to query it on historical grounds, so I relaxed the prohibition. As it happened, nobody did; but the barrier has not gone up so completely since. I wish it had.

The origin of this long and detailed historical novel about Cornwall and religion and Spain and the later Armadas derived from a day when I was reading some eighteenth-century papers while writing the third or fourth
Poldark
novel. The entry referred to one ‘John Killigrew of Arwenack, governor of Pendennis Castle in Cornwall, who in 1596 sold his castle to the King of Spain.' This seemed such an outrageous and outlandish statement that I felt I must some day find out the truth about it. The time was not then, or it would divert me from the Poldarks. The time came, many years later, when, in the middle of a spate of modern novels, I decided this had to be the next assignment.

Obviously a more suitable subject could have been chosen for the only period in my life when I have been footloose and without a settled home. But one doesn't always choose subjects. They may come partly from conscious decision, partly from outside pressures, but usually and mainly from a subconscious urge from within. I know that, at least for myself, once a subject has been chosen there is no going back. Never in my writing life have I begun a novel and not finished it. Nor have I ever been able to break it off for another novel and finish the first one later. Often in the direst trouble, I have tried to jettison a story – or at least put it aside for the time being – but to no avail. I can't begin to create something different while a book is in the process of creation.

Three times in my life it has taken three years to write a novel – and in all cases I have done nothing whatever else in those years: no articles, no short stories, no reviews of other people's work, nothing for radio or television. In the case of
The Grove of Eagles
an itinerant life may have caused some of the delay, even though the volume of research was chiefly responsible. In
The Green Flash
there were all sorts of obstacles which I recount later in this book. The third of these novels was
Angell, Pearl and Little God
, and after its success in the United States, I was invited to write an article for an American literary magazine about the way the book came to be written. I hope I shall not be thought pretentious if I reproduce this article, since it sheds some light on the difficulty faced in this book, and also refers to the inception of
Marnie
.

It is likely that the problems which made my last novel,
Angell, Pearl and Little God
, so difficult to write would not have affected a young writer at all. At least, they would not have affected
me
as a young writer because when I was young the overmastering need to tell the story would have ridden roughshod over the manner of its telling. But with the years and with experience one becomes more selective, more self-conscious, and one has more desire for perfection of technique.

(At this stage it will be better to advise all who despise ‘a story' in the novel that they may safely pass on to the next article. For although I have always had more to say in a novel than the telling of a story, the story itself has always been the framework on which the rest has depended for its form and shape. I have never been clever enough – or egotistical enough … to spend 300 pages dipping experimental buckets into the sludge of my own subconscious. I have always been more interested in other people than myself – though there has to be something of myself in every character created, or he will not come alive. I have always been more interested in people than in events; but it is only through events that I have ever been able to illuminate people.)

It is a commonplace of the suspense novelist to use the first person singular in presenting his story. It brings an immediacy to events, to danger, to crisis, to the smallest detail of the central character's life. It concentrates the narrative wonderfully by preventing the writer from wandering off down byways of irrelevance. By limiting the point of view it helps mystification (on any level – from Proust or Henry James to Raymond Chandler or the latest paperback writer) and the very limitations are a challenge and a stimulus to both author and reader.

But the personally told story has a number of drawbacks, and one which is frequently overlooked is that the narrative character usually remains something of a negative personality – a sort of multiple mirror reflecting other people's images but never his own. Things happen to him, events occur, he feels heat and cold and pleasure and pain, he may have endless narrow escapes and struggle among the enveloping sheets of a dozen lecherous beds; or he may spend the book's lifetime trying to unravel the mystery surrounding two haunted children. In either or any case, it is the villains who beset him, the women who seduce him or, even, the ghosts who haunt him, who come to have personality and remain in the reader's mind. Not ‘I'. Not the mirror person.

How does one retain the first person and overcome the obstacle? Or can one?

Various authors have tried to do so in the past.
Marnie
was my first attempt. It seemed to succeed. But whether it succeeded or not, the process fascinated me and made the novel doubly worth writing.

The fault with the average narrator is that he is too normal. His very normality is the plain mirror reflecting the oddities of others. But let the narrator be a psychological case, like Marnie, a compulsive thief and sexually frigid.
Her
mirror is not plain, it is flawed and distorts what it reflects. All the other characters therefore are at first slightly out of true because of it – that is until the reader adjusts himself. Then you have the intriguing situation of the narrator betraying her character, her slightly twisted reasoning, unselfconsciously, so that the reader gradually perceives what she is, while she does not know she is so revealing herself …

The first character to present himself to me in
Angell, Pearl and Little God
was the first one named: a stout, greedy, middle-aged lawyer. For years I had had the idea of such a man marrying a pretty shop girl or factory girl less than half his age and then allowing the events to move forward, the tragi-comedy to work its way out, from there. Not an unusual situation in life. Not an unusual situation in a novel. But here again I wanted to see it through the eyes of this mean and unattractive man. The narrating mirror was not going to be quite clear. One would not see Pearl exactly as she was but as Angell saw her. One would also see the rival – as yet a shadowy figure but weekly growing in substance – through Angell's eyes. The tragi-comedy of Angell's betrayal would take on another dimension precisely because he was telling it himself. One would see only a third of the picture, and the light cast upon that third would be brighter for the shadow covering the rest.

But at this stage, not only was I becoming more interested in Pearl, but Godfrey Brown – or Little God – was emerging from the mists and was threatening to monopolize my attention absolutely. At first, just a tough little rowdy on the make, ready to turn any sort of mildly dishonest penny, he shortly changed in my mind to a mechanic respraying stolen cars and handy with his fists, earning a few pounds here and there sparring in the London East End gyms; and from there he gradually developed into a chauffeur and suddenly into a man with a career in boxing and the ability and the ambition to get to the top.

At this juncture I knew virtually nothing about boxing, but constant visits to the East End of London quickened my interest. Several times I borrowed a seedy raincoat from the Secretary of the Savile Club, wore my oldest trilby, and slouched down to the Thomas à Becket pub in the Old Kent Road, where with a stub of cigarette in my mouth I would prop up the bar; and presently, when folk had got used to me, I would saunter up to the gym upstairs and watch Henry Cooper sparring.

Then by chance I got an introduction to one of the big fight promoters, Mike Barrett, and he generously opened every door. By this time fascination with the subject itself had taken over from any mere matter of duty-research, and it seemed abundantly clear that I could write a book entirely about the boxing career of Little God. I attended meetings between the various promoters when their protégés were being matched. I went to weigh-ins, sparring bouts, sat behind the scenes in the dressing rooms before and after they went up to fight. I even attended the pay-outs. The world of prizefighting had become much more interesting to me than the world of law offices or even of a pretty girl on the perfumery counter of a big store.

Yet, since I generally find it a mistake to be diverted from original intentions, I began to write the novel in the first person of Wilfred Angell, middle-aged Bachelor of Law.

At first it went well. To begin, it is all Angell's adventures: his consultation with the doctor, his visit to Switzerland, his meeting with and courtship of Pearl. It is fascinating and right to see all this through the slightly distorting eyes of a stout, selfish, greedy man. But very soon I began to appreciate how much I should lose. The drawback as well as the stimulus of the first-person singular narrative is, of course, that the adventures of only one person and the workings of only one mind can be revealed. In this book, one would have had to see Pearl's adventures with Godfrey only insofar as she told Angell of them. One would have had to see only the boxing matches that Angell went to or such as he might have had related to him by Pearl or Lady Vosper or Vincent Birman, two other characters in the story. After about 25,000 words I stopped for reassessment.

Now something like this had happened to me once before – in the writing of
Marnie
. That time I was halfway through the book; it was the first time I had written in the person of a woman; and I found myself gagging at the love scenes in which the narrator was made love to by a man. So I stopped and began again at page one, writing it entirely afresh in the third person and from an omnisicent point of view. And, although one can begin cheerfully enough writing ‘she came down the steps' instead of ‘ I came down the steps', it doesn't go on like that. Whole areas of the book take on an entirely different complexion. So I persevered in this revision, and having rewritten (in longhand, as I do everything) about 45,000 words of
Marnie
, I stopped and left it alone for a month, and then went back to read it through. And quite clearly the new version was losing enormously in the change. Not merely was the distorting mirror removed but the language lacked the colloquial immediacy of the original. The whole book seemed prosaic where before it had been dynamic.

So back I went to the original version, reading it, rewriting it here and there until I came again to the troublesome love scenes. But this time I had somehow sunk deeper into the character of the girl, and they went through without let or hindrance. When the book was finished I was convinced – and still am – that the first person narrative was a tremendous gain upon any other possible way of presenting
that
novel.

A reluctance, therefore, to change from this method of narrative in
Angell, Pearl and Little God
is understandable, and it was only after an agony of indecision that I eventually sat down and laboriously rewrote the first 25,000 words in the omniscient third person.

Again a month's wait, again a careful reading, again a tremendous sense of loss. Angell's predicament cried out to be told in the biased first person. Also, even though so differently told from
Marnie
, [there was in
Angell
] a loss of colloquial immediacy in the telling.

So one came to an impasse. Neither way would work. Either way meant giving up so much. After about a further month's horrible indecision, I decided to leave the first chapters, as told by Angell, in
his
skin; and then began to tell the next part in
Pearl
's skin. This way one still got the urgency of first-person narrative, and still it could be told through the mirror of another personality; it was only that the person changed part way.

After this it was quite a simple matter several chapters later to switch the personal narrative a third time to Little God. In this way the novel even seemed to gain something, because each time one saw the other characters through a different flawed mirror, thus helping to create them in all three physical dimensions …

Thus I reached about the halfway mark of the book. After Little God's piece it was natural to turn to a new long piece by Angell. After Angell, Pearl. This way one could gradually work right through to the climax of the novel and so finish it. It was almost a new idea!

Again a gap of a month, and I read through what I had written. A new idea? Surely not. It had been used by other novelists before, and never, as far as I could remember, with complete success. What begins as a brilliant device ends as a gimmick. To change the narrator once or twice is perhaps permissible. After that the wheels begin to creak. The author labours to bring it off, and both he and the reader are conscious of the effort.

After this rejection – and it was ultimate and absolute on my part – I was left once again with the alternatives of either choosing one of the three principal characters and restricting the knowledge and the illumination of character to what he could perceive, thus gaining a little but losing a lot. Or accepting the fact that as this novel had developed, the challenge of the first-person singular could not be taken up, and returning to the omniscient third person, with its loss of idiosyncrasy and immediacy but its enormous scope, its complete lack of blinkered vision.

So I now scrapped what I had written – all but the 25,000 words in which I had experimented in this style six months before – and from then on wrote the book as it later appeared.