Memoirs of a Private Man (6 page)

I had now been writing for five years and had virtually nothing to show for it. Surely mine was a pipe dream, as everyone else thought and knew and had been trying to tell me for ages? Why didn't I wake up and stir myself and get some regular decent honest work? I was untrained for any profession, but I could surely turn my hand to something practical and realizable.

About this time, having written two unpublishable novels, I found myself involved in amateur theatricals in the village Women's Institute. I acted in one or two small pieces, and at once it struck me how perfectly frightful the dialogue was, and how equally awful the contrived events and denouements. So, while keeping the titles and the general storylines, I began to rewrite the pieces and found the audience most happily responding. The authors got their minute royalties, and we got the laughs.

Just then there was a popular movement to raise money for the unemployed, and someone, interested in what I'd done, said why didn't I write a three-act play and it could be put on at the local cinema for this good cause. So I sat down and wrote a play in six weeks, called it
Seven Suspected
, and this was eventually produced and played to a full and appreciative house for three nights. It was never printed, but copies circulated in typescript, and it was produced in Truro, Camborne, Hayle, Bury, Hendon and elsewhere, always with great success. Looking back, one particular feature strikes me – hardly a line had to be altered from the first draft. When one thinks of authors writing and rewriting scenes endlessly until the moment of first production, this seems preposterous. Of course it was only played by amateurs, who probably didn't know any better, but every line was
speakable
, and when actors found their lines producing laughs they didn't want to change them.

Coincident with this, there appeared on the horizon a Captain and Mrs Craddock, who had taken a house for six months in St Agnes. She was actually a
real, live authoress
and had
published novels
–
many novels
– under her maiden name of Elizabeth Carfrae. A great and important person indeed! She was taken up and lionized by what passed in the district for society, and she heard of my play and helped with its production and was generally very kind and generous to me. When she knew I had written a novel she asked to see it and sent it up with a note to her agent, J. B. Pinker, who had it read and sent it back, saying he did not think he could place it.

At the end of the six months the Craddocks abruptly departed, leaving unpaid bills everywhere, and were never heard of again. It is a characteristic of some authors which I have always determined to avoid. She was published by Mills & Boon, and nowadays we all know about them: ‘ not lit., my dear, but Romance with a capital R!' I shouldn't have minded. Indeed I should have been delighted to be published by anyone.

I have always valued her kindness in trying to help me.

In all this my mother took little part. She enjoyed her bridge and my company and my chauffeuring her around. She virtually took no sides in the opinion war. I do not know, and now I shall never know, how much she believed in my ability. (Oh, she believed
tremendously
in my ability – was I not her son? – but I mean my ability to make a
living
out of writing.) She was a great one for taking the easy way, for postponing the awkward encounter, for letting things be. She had a son at home – she could just afford to keep him and herself in a pleasant degree of comfort: why should she thrust me out to make a sort of living in some uncongenial job or – even more to be deplored – push me off to live among the viceridden streets of London, to sink or swim, as many better men had done?

But although she was unkind enough to pass on the occasional sneer, she never personally interfered nor enquired in a way which would cause embarrassment to me. I was my own man. It was a comfortable life for us both – a million miles too comfortable for me.

I am happy she lived just long enough to see the first explosions of success.

My father's younger sister, Mollie, was unmarried, deeply romantic and intense about everything. She was enraptured to learn that one of her nephews wanted to be a writer. She and my parents must have discussed me at length on many occasions, but I never knew the substance of the talks. Anyway, her approach to me was much more tactful than her brother's, and although I must have been as tight as a crab so far as my own writing was concerned we did have endless talks about literature and about writing in general. She was an aspirant and failed writer of children's stories herself. Whether she believed any more than my father in an ultimate commercial success for me I know not, but she encouraged me in every way she could. In the end I let her read my first novel. I cannot remember whether she said she liked the book when she read it – she was always fiercely candid – but she declared passionately that it was quite wrong to keep it stuffed in a drawer and that it must be tried on other publishers. She persuaded me to retype a few pages that were dog-eared and then lovingly bound it into two volumes, with stitched sheets and cardboard sides so that it opened easily and looked like a book. I sent it off to Messrs. Ward, Lock & Co. Ltd.

Until now I had submitted the typescript to those publishers who published the sort of books I liked to read. This was particularly so of Hodder, who published John Buchan and A. E. W. Mason and Eric Ambler and ‘Sapper' and Philip Oppenheim and Dornford Yates, etc., etc. It cannot be said honestly that I liked Ward, Lock books. They were a grade lower down the scale, and, looking them over in a bookshop once, I thought, ‘Surely my book is better than some of these!' What I didn't know at the time was that Ward, Lock had started off many famous writers and then, through editorial inadequacy or failure of their publicity department or the meanness of their directors, had allowed them to slip away to more fashionable publishers who proceeded to cash in.

Ward, Lock kept the book seven months, then accepted it. I remember it was the 10th of May and I was in bed with a filthy sore throat. Within two hours of receiving the letter the sore throat had disappeared. I showed the letter to my mother, who looked pleased and startled and ultimately delighted.

The letter from Ward, Lock just said they were sorry for such a long delay but after due consideration they had decided to publish my novel ‘on a 10% basis', provided I would agree to toning down one or two scenes in the book, which they said was so exciting that they felt it was not necessary to ‘out-Herod Herod in the details'. The letter was signed S. E. Sarcoe. It goes without saying that I agreed to the small amendments. This was the only editing of the typescript that they ever suggested; otherwise it came out exactly as it was put in.

Incidentally, the contract, when it came for me to sign, was only a page and a half in length, and, apart from the fact that it offered me no advance on account of royalties and no increase on the 10% of the published price with increased sales, it was a model of simplicity and generosity. All rights, except for a few small ones, were expressly reserved to the author. No modern publisher would offer such an unworldly contract.

When the news got around in the village it was a sensation. A few still wouldn't quite believe it until they saw the published book – and one relative was frankly doubting that it would ever come out at all. But most people thought my fortune was made. Our local dentist – an educated Londoner – made calculations of the sales the book must have if merely every branch of Boots' Library took one. (He was clearly ignorant that the practice of Boots' Library – like that of most libraries – was to buy a couple of dozen copies and send them around where there was a request for them; so you put your name down and waited until one came free.) It was a bad time for new novelists – I have never known it not – but perhaps it was specially bad with Hitler beginning his long tramp to menace the peace of the world.

The book,
The House with the Stained-Glass Windows
, was accepted in May and published in October. In between I went up to London and met my new publishers in their substantial building in Salisbury Square, EC4. Ward, Lock was an old-established firm, well known for publishing cook books – including Mrs Beeton – and a vast selection of excellent guides. These were the bread and butter. Fiction was a sideline but a substantial one. They also published the
Windsor Magazine
which, after the
Strand
, was the most important monthly magazine of the day. I met my correspondent, Mr S. E. Sarcoe, who was the editor-in-chief, a cheerful, fast-talking, fastmoving, middle-aged man, whose lips seemed to get in the way of his words, a down-to-earth, no-nonsense, friendly man who knew a very great deal about commercial publishing but whose literary tastes didn't exactly reach the stratosphere. He was delighted to know I had ‘almost finished' a second novel (a heart-warming reaction for me) but he startled me by saying that they wanted two novels a year from me. There was ‘not much money' in writing, but what there was could chiefly be earned by regular and constant output. They would like the second book by November, ready for next April, and preferably one the following May.

After that I met Wilfred Lock, the chairman of the company and virtually the dictator. He was a strange small man who was never away from the office and had his eye on everything. He had a very disconcerting habit when you met him of falling completely silent and then, when you volunteered something,
immediately
interrupting with a remark of his own. I have never met anyone else with this strange off-putting gift. Was it deliberate, I wondered sometimes? How else could he always have something ready to say within two seconds of your beginning to speak?

He greeted me with agreeable detachment and was pleased to learn that for the moment I did not have to depend on my earnings for every crust. Financially speaking, he said more than once, he always looked on novel-writing as a stick to walk with but never a crutch.

Naturally, from the moment that Ward, Lock decided to publish me, my view of their output drastically changed, and I found out all sorts of new virtues in their list. I felt myself lucky to be taken up by such a substantial and old-established firm. And, by God, I was! They were London-based, had a fair number of reps (commercial travellers in those days), a high standard of book production, an office in Melbourne and agents in all the ‘Colonial' territories. When my book was published it came out with handsome advertisements in the heavy Sunday papers and the best dailies, and it received a fair amount of notice from reviewers.

Even now I'm not sure if I appreciate how extraordinarily fortunate I was – for I now regard this first novel as amateurish, derivative (how could it be anything else?) and sloppily written. The one thing it did have, I suppose, was immense story-telling drive, and if you could believe the story it would grip you to the last page. Had I been a publisher I would certainly have rejected it.

The reviews on the whole were kind, perhaps too kind. Robert Lynd in the
News Chronicle
headed his solus review ‘Wicked Uncle' and was mildly amusing at my expense; Torquemada in the
Observer
noticed it, the
Mail
and the
Telegraph
had nice things to say. The review I appreciated most was a thoughtful one in a newspaper called the
Buxton Advertiser
. I wonder if it still exists? It criticized all the things it should have criticized but managed to convey appreciation at the same time. Its last sentence read: ‘Nevertheless keep an eye on young Mr Graham, for he has come to stay.'

The reviewer, bless him whoever he was, could hardly have known how truly he was speaking.

The reception locally was flattering. I became known as the local author, and was generally made more of than I had been before. I remember at a bridge drive – a horror I then attended to oblige my mother – a Mr Arthur Mitchell, an elderly retired London chemist who had some pretensions to being the squire of the village, said to me that he had enjoyed my novel, and then, with a half attempt to take a rise out of me, asked, ‘When is your next one going to be published?' It gave me exquisite pleasure to tell him and to see his surprise.

Because I had stockpiled by having two novels finished before the first was published, I was able to have a third ready for the following September; but thereafter I fell rapidly behind Ward, Lock's urgings to produce two books a year. I am not by nature a fast writer, and, although flattered by their requests, I instinctively rejected the idea of becoming a writing machine. In those days I was far less ambitious than I later became. What I really wanted above all was to improve, to learn, to expand, to make each book better than the last, and I thought one whole novel a year was the absolute maximum.

Also I was reading a lot of dangerous books on the technique of writing: Percy Lubbock's
The Craft of Fiction
, John Steeksma's
The Writing Way
, Basil Hogarth's
The Technique of Novel Writing
, and
The Technique of the Novel
by Carl Grabo. These were fascinating but they did me a lot of harm. They grafted self-consciousness on the story-telling stem, and, although they did not throttle it, they doubled the labour without adding much to the quality of the finished product. My fifth book,
The Dangerous Pawn
, was my first attempt at a straight novel. When Wilfred Lock read it he said it was ten years ahead of any of the previous books but ‘ commercially I could shake you'. How right he was. I was told that Hatchard's had been taking a dozen of my books and occasionally reordering, but when they heard
The Dangerous Pawn
was not a thriller, they would not even look at it.

Not that any of these books had been a commercial success. They had not produced anything like enough for even a single person to live on. (Looking at the figures I am about to quote, I feel as if I am, financially, writing not of the Thirties but of the Middle Ages.) My mother had a more or less guaranteed income from her partnership in Mawdsleys of £360 a year. On this she was able to live in a degree of comfort, with a living-in maid, a small car, and to take at least one holiday at a hotel a year. My first novel earned me £29, my second £33, my third £41, my fourth £35. Occasionally a little extra trickled in from somewhere, but my earnings never exceeded £60 a year. A distinct depression began to settle on me. In the early books on writing I had read, people spoke of the poor returns that might be expected of a first or second novel; they had not alerted me to the fact that a third, a fourth and a fifth might earn no more, or even less. There was no build-up at all. A year's hard work produced £50. To be able to live off my earnings I would have to write six novels a year. Some people did, I knew, using different names. During the Second World War a youngish middleaged novelist called Maisie Grieg came to live in Perranporth with her husband. She was pregnant for the first time, and this was an area reasonably free from bombs. She also wrote under the name of Jennifer Ames and some other pseudonyms. Her son was born in the July. At the Christmas I went to see her, and someone said, ‘How many novels have you written this year, Maisie?' ‘Only five,' she said, ‘but then I did have Robert.'