On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer (25 page)

The first year at King’s was spent learning Old English or Anglo-Saxon, Shakespeare and Chaucer’s Middle English works. I seemed to manage though I’ve never been good at languages. I suppose I quite liked Anglo-Saxon for the sound of the words. Middle English was also quaint, with ‘brids’ for ‘birds’ and ‘aproche’ for ‘approach’. I love the idea of a dynamic language, words which twist and turn themselves into different shapes over the centuries, a bit like live creatures evolving into animals which only just resemble their ancestors.

I learned enough to get me through Anglo-Saxon and actually thrived on Chaucer, Medieval Religious Lyrics, Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman and other works of the period. They opened up a whole new world of stories and poems for me. I had read poems by some of the metaphysical poets like Andrew Marvell. Also, Colonel Lovelace, Milton and the lesser known earlier poets and poems were new to me. Wyatt’s metaphoric doe bearing the words ‘
Touch me not, for Caesar’s I am’
brought to mind those earlier days of my youth in London when the girls of that city scorned my boyish advances.

In the second year we got on to the old favourites, the Brontës, George Eliot, Jane Austen, etc. I fell into a trap when I went to a tutorial where I was the only state school student present. As I have written, much of my learning has come from books. Certainly my ancient history was learned by correspondence and therefore I have not heard many words pronounced aloud. I guess at them and probably pronounce ‘Thucydides’, ‘Aeschylus’ and other names of Greek people and places quite oddly, putting the emphasis on the wrong syllables. In this particular tutorial the Christian name ‘St John’ came up from one of the Brontë works. I pronounced it as it is written and the other students burst out laughing. ‘It’s pronounced “Singe-en”,’ our professor told me gently. I felt humiliated and not a little angry with the young snots who continued to snigger at me and for little more than a couple of old pennies would have socked a nose or two. Since our tutor said nothing to them I did. I let out a few expletives which unfortunately only served to confirm their suspicions as to my early schooling.

I very much enjoyed American novelists: Melville, Pynchon, Steinbeck, Stevens and, most especially, Faulkner. The last author’s
As I Lay Dying
was to me breathtakingly good. There’s a paragraph in that novel which talks of sawing up the ‘yellow days’ like the planks used to build the house in which the old woman is dying. Then the terrible odyssey over several USA states to find the wife and mother her last resting place which she had requested in her will. A fantastic book. And the Americans are so good at short stories. Writers like Poe, Hawthorne and O. Henry leave me yearning to make my mark. Hawthorne’s ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’
is a superb tale, the writing of which I envy with every fibre of my authorial being. Also the playwrights, like O’Neill and Miller and Tennessee Williams. Finally the poets: William Carlos Williams, Emily Dickenson, Emmerson. All superb.

In the third year I read another thousand books, some of them fiction, some of them critical works and biographies. By the end of three years I was stuffed with knowledge. I took my finals in the Spring of 1985 and came out with a Desmond. I was a little disappointed with my 2.2, but in truth I had not worked as hard as I could have done and actually did not need the degree to get a job. It was an indulgence really, that period of study, but I learned a lot from it and I was immensely puffed with myself. I was a graduate, a BA (Hons) and no one in our family had ever done anything close to it before me. One of my professors wrote to me later and said I had been very close to a 2.1 but obviously had not quite crossed the line.

I made two new lifelong friends during my period at King’s. The first was my Icelandic saga tutor, John Porter, a man I admire greatly for his philosophical view on life and his ability to write and speak Anglo-Saxon fluently. The second was a student of my own age, Birgit Benkhoff, a German-born woman of powerful intellect who would eventually become a professor of economics at Dresden University. Both have influenced me, not so much with my writing, but through their hearts and minds.

During my time at King’s I had rewritten
Witchwater Country
and changed my agent. I left Murray Pollinger for a new agent called Maggie Noach, who had until recently worked for the giant agency A.P. Watt, but had been let go. She started her own agency and I was lucky to get in on the ground floor. It was the best move I ever made. Small, dark-haired and ferocious when necessary, Maggie was a brilliant agent. She was a single woman, born of upper-class parents and knew everyone and anyone in the publishing industry. She was tough and hard-working and she took on
Witchwater Country
.

‘I’ll place this if it kills me,’ she told me in her Sloane accent, the expression on her attractive narrow features a picture of determination.

She did indeed have a struggle with it, but eventually she placed it with The Bodley Head, a publisher like Faber and Faber that was respected and admired throughout the literary world. It was a brilliant coup and I was walking on air. My first ‘literary’ novel. Indeed it was longlisted for the Booker prize and the critics loved it. Annette and I went on several backpacking tours of the Greek islands on the advance I received from The Bodley Head, to Syme, Poros, Kos and several others, meeting a new set of friends on the island of Tilos who were to have great significance in our lives. Doris and Philippe, French-Canadian graduates from Quebec, were holidaying there and studying ancient Greek weaponry. They were both archaeologists and we got on with them extremely well, eating with them most nights at the only ‘taverna’ in town, an open-air barbecue site where the proprietor arrived every evening at six o’clock and said either ‘fish’ or ‘lamb’. Whatever he had managed to get, we ate, along with chips and Greek salad.

At around the time I changed my literary agent Faber and Faber were undergoing a change. Charles Monteith retired and the commissioning editor who took his place was a much younger man. I am told he does not like science fiction. Whether he does or not, Robert McCrum’s presence rid Fabers of all four science fiction authors within a year. We may not have left for all same reasons, but McCrum’s apparent dislike of science fiction was at the root of the departures

A short while after taking over as commissioning editor at Faber and Faber, McCrum wrote and published a so-called thriller,
In the Secret State
. I read it out of curiosity and failed to be impressed. It was an incredibly boring and immature novel. If this was the man who was going to judge whether my books were worth publishing then I was happy to be leaving Fabers. Robert McCrum was no Charles Monteith.

I applied instead to the Valhalla of science fiction books, Victor Gollancz Ltd. The new editor there, now that John Bush had retired, was another young man of a very different stamp. Malcolm Edwards had already read most of the tales in the collection of short stories I sent him and agreed to publish
The Songbirds of Pain
. The short story is the foundation stone of science fiction and I was and still am very proud of that collection which contains the story ‘sumi dreams of a paper frog’ written all in lower case and based on the unreal hours I spent on sentry duty in various pockets of the British Empire.

J.G. Ballard had read ‘sumi dreams’ in
Extro
magazine and he wrote to me, saying, ‘This is the best short story I’ve read for many years.’ J.G. Ballard was one of the Britain’s premier science fiction authors and getting a comment like that from such a respected author was a thrilling experience. So I was now with Victor Gollancz Ltd and thus my next few books proudly wore the prestigious yellow jacket which adorned all VG science fiction books.

The paperback of
Songbirds
was brought out by my editor Jane Johnson, who commissioned the artist Jim Burns to do the cover. It was the best cover I ever had – superb.

In the meantime I was getting on famously with Maggie Noach, who was everything I thought an agent should be: tough with publishers, soft with her authors, determined with the books she had to offer. Maggie became a friend and stayed with Annette and I many times when she was alive. We also stayed with her sometimes. She had a dog that was a damn nuisance, a small thing called Toby that was not well behaved, but I was willing to put up with Toby in order to be close to Maggie. When Toby eventually died an identical Toby took its place. It had a different name, but it was Toby all right, an impossible creature to escape.

In 1993 I asked Maggie if she could find me more work. Now that I was writing on a computer I could do at least three books a year, plus a few short stories. In those days I consistently wrote two-thousand words a day. That’s 10,000 words a week. I could easily finish a full 100,000 word novel in three months. No science fiction publisher wanted more than one a book a year, so it had to be in a completely different genre under a pseudonym.

Maggie took on the task immediately and went to Hodder Headline and told them I was good at family sagas. I actually had no idea whether I could write an historical novel set in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, usually about a family firm or business that goes from rags to riches and sometimes back to rags again, but the heroine always ends up happy. Maggie got me a contract for three fat novels, which I wrote under the pseudonym F.K. Salwood, my nan’s maiden name.

So appeared
The Oystercatcher’s Cry
, a novel about oyster farming on the River Crouch in Essex;
The Saffron Fields
about saffron farming at Saffron Walden, in Essex; and
The Ragged School
about teaching Victorian orphans in a school in Essex and in Sydney, Australia. The heroines were feminine, but characteristically tough and always got their man in the end and they enjoyed sex in a time when it was unladylike to do so. I had great fun writing them and the books did well enough to provide me with an extra income on top of the science fiction advances.

In the middle of writing the sagas Maggie got me the contract for a novelisation of the movie
Highlander
. This is still the book I mention if people ask me, ‘Have I read anything of yours?’ They probably haven’t
read
it, but they know of the movie and are usually impressed. I was allowed to see most of the film before it was actually finished and was blown away by the opening scene, where the warring clans came swarming over the hills to the sound of Queen’s stunning music. The story line, centred around ‘immortals’ who lost their magical status if they had their heads severed by a swordsman, was rather silly but hey, I was getting paid a good lump sum for novelising it.

I was given the dialogue script and told to produce a finished book within two weeks. It remains the one and only work I have written entirely on a typewriter and the first draft was the final draft. Every page I typed was the page that went into the manuscript. There were no revisions. It was my Frankenstein’s monster and considering the fact that I was working on it sixteen hours a day without a break for fourteen days, it ain’t half bad mum.

I was allowed to go to the London premier and felt like a showbiz personality for one night. No one there knew I’d written the book of course. Nobody really cared about books. Film people don’t. But I had a very small taste of Hollywood and I liked it a lot.

More or less at the same time as I was novelising
Highlander
, Rob was doing the same with a film called
The Emerald Forest
. The movie was produced by John Boreman and made more sense than my film. Rob did an excellent job of novelising
The Emerald Forest
and, unlike me, allowed the book to go out under his real name.
Highlander
was initially published under the pseudonym Garry Douglas, but later the publishers changed that to Garry Kilworth without asking me.

My favourite film maker at that time was Werner Herzog, with such magnificent movies as
Where the Green Ants Dream, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Fitzcarraldo
and
Aguirre
,
Wrath of God
, starring that volatile actor and friend of Herzog, Klaus Kinsky. What a tremendous talent that man has, as does the unpredictable Kinsky, who starred in many of Herzog’s films. I would give anything to have be allowed to novelise one of Herzog’s great epics. Indeed, the writer Gwyneth Jones and I were enthusing one day at a Milford writer’s workshop about
Fitzcarraldo
and the documentary that followed it,
The Making of Fitzcarraldo,
when something she said gave me an idea for a short story. That conversation resulted in me writing the short story ‘Filming the Making of the Film of the Making of
Fitzcarraldo
’, one of the best tales that have come from the white-hot pen that I use to write short stories.

Writing shorts is a completely different exercise from writing novels. A novel is a slow-drip occupation. Each day you sit down and do a thousand, two-thousand, or whatever number of words, and the finished article seems infinitely improbable target somewhere in the future. The whole novel must be structured and crafted, it continually changes shape and form as it grows, and revisions need to be applied even as the pages gradually multiply. You cannot surge ahead with fire and sword, as you do with a short story. You must gradually work a novel into shape.

A short story can be held in the head, whole and ready for the pages. One can sit down and burn through a short story in one sitting if one has the stamina. I do. I love that fiery furious writing pitch that I can reach while getting a short story down on paper. I stop for nothing except coffee: not for revisions, not for spelling, not for checking facts. All that can be done later, once the brain has unloaded its fabulous cargo. Only then do I go through it, and through it, and through it, until I feel I have either a gem, or – yes – sometimes a dud. I revise a short story many many times, sometimes doing ten drafts, until I feel I have exhausted all that I have to offer it. Often I start with (what I think of as) a stunning last line in my head and have to get from the first sentence to that final impact.