Wish You Were Here (36 page)

The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul
is an enjoyable book, though not Douglas’s best. It is nicely observed and imbued with such a precise sense of place that one day it might be possible that literary fans will follow Gently’s path from Islington to St. Pancras Station in the same way that James Joyce buffs walk round Dublin on Bloomsday. In the novel Douglas takes a figure of speech—“
For God’s Sake!
”—and rotates it through ninety degrees. What would we do for the sake of the gods? What would they do for themselves? Wouldn’t immortality be the most sadistic burden? No wonder Odin (an echo of the master of the universe in
Hitchhiker’s
) is so damn tired. For him a nursing home, an infinite supply of clean linen and no responsibilities seem like an appealing arrangement. On the other hand, the alternative to immortality is not such a bundle of laughs, and Dirk discovers it can be disgustingly messy. Gently himself plays a rather passive role in the book, not so much an actor in the drama as a non-participant observer. The novel is full of wit and verbal pyrotechnics, but, stripped of such camouflage, it’s bleak.

By this time Douglas and Jane had finally moved into Duncan Terrace. Douglas insisted on the unbelievable stereo and a grand piano, and the rest of the administrative burden of the move fell to Jane. The mechanics of writing were much the same as before. Sue was on hand for sympathy and feedback. Lisa Glass, the copy editor, also rushed round from time to time to help them chill out. Douglas had a high regard for Lisa, whose intelligence saved him from various inconsistencies and solecisms. (He was impressed when she checked, and corrected, some of Dirk’s playful sums with his I Ching calculator.) Sometimes Michael Bywater turned up to offer entertainment, stimulation and dazzling conversation.

Once, Sue Freestone recalls, Janet appeared:

Douglas had been angsting at me for days about the increasing length of the grass in his back garden in Islington. At this point I was debating whether to buy a lawn mower on Heinemann expenses and cut it myself to shut him up. His mother, Janet, arrived unannounced bearing a hover mower. A small, determined woman, a quarter-sized spitting image of Douglas, she marched past us without a word out into the garden, unwound the cord, plugged in the mower, marched purposefully up and down until the grass was all cut, unplugged the mower, wrapped the cord round the handle, tucked the whole thing under her arm and marched out again, still without a word. Douglas and I sat looking at one another in stunned silence. He had not said anything to her about his grass worries but somehow she just knew.*
 
¹⁷⁸

What’s more, Janet took the grass clippings all the way back to Dorset.

••••••

As soon as Douglas had finished
The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul,
he’d promised he would go to Australia for a paperback promotion. So that he felt under unnegotiable obligation, for he had cancelled in the past, Pan had taken the precaution of booking tickets and working out his itinerary in some detail. He had to go, but he was still writing as the car arrived to take him to the airport. He edited while the limo glided across London and he was still fine-tuning the text as he was driven down the M4 to Heathrow.

When he arrived in Perth, Western Australia, twenty hours later, Douglas was still writing. Debbie McInnes, a likeable, energetic woman and one of the best publicists in Australia, remembers picking him up for the first appointment and finding him in his PJs, still making changes. Final corrections had to be faxed to England from the hotel. Debbie is 5’3". Douglas was 6’5". It is a pity there is no picture of them on the streets together.

Douglas had been out there before, in 1983, on promo duty for the Pan edition of
Life, the Universe and Everything.
It had been an enormous success. Brian Davies was the managing director of Pan Australia and Maggie Crystal was in charge of marketing. The company had recently declared independence from Collins and it was determined to do a spectacular job. Maggie remembers Douglas with affection from that first trip:

Our campaign was mainly author-led with plenty of telly. Douglas was a pleasure to promote. He was very clever and rather childlike. He was funny and had absolutely no side to him; the Aussies liked that. His views about British literary snobbery went down very well. He wasn’t A-list in literary terms, but he was culty. A cult is when you are enthusiastic about something, but don’t realize that millions of others feel the same—and that was certainly true of Douglas’s fans. We did TV in all the major cities: Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane. Douglas worked very hard. He was easy and could be quite funky and fresh even late at night. We sold a lot of copies. [Brian Davies estimates over 75,000 during that trip.]

For his part, Douglas adored Australia—the climate, the swimming, the space. Everything. He had discovered scuba diving on his first trip to Malibu, but it wasn’t until he got to Australia that he realized it could be so indecently pleasurable. Jane says that although he was not one of nature’s sportsmen, he was a very good swimmer. He loved diving. Once he’d overcome his natural buoyancy, those large hydrodynamic control surfaces would come into their own. The feeling of weightlessness underwater, and of liberation, the sheer sensual joy of it, are a delight. The colours of the fish, especially on the Great Barrier Reef, are indescribable. The flash of iridescent light as an entire shoal turns as one (how do they do that?) is breathtaking. Douglas found release down there, and spent as long underwater as his schedule and his (always urgent) obligations would allow.

Douglas also liked the Australians themselves a great deal. By and large they were a refreshingly straightforward lot compared to the brittle and competitive ambience shared by many of his Cambridge contemporaries. He was to return to Australia whenever he could. On one occasion—the madness of which must have appealed to his sense of style—he even went to Australia for a day. He’d promised to give a talk at the Adelaide Literary Festival, but he was once again under the gun for late delivery. He flew in and out again in twenty-four hours.

The 1987 trip to Australia coincided with Douglas’s need to recoup the truckload of fifties he’d tipped down the Duncan Terrace building site, to say nothing of the money he’d lost to his erring accountant and the taxman. In any event he was planning to do a lot of travelling for his next book. Douglas’s relationship with Jane was going through a highly unsettled phase featuring long periods of separation. For all these reasons, but also for tax purposes, Douglas decided to take a year out of the UK.

Starting this period with a promo trip to Australia was ideal. Debbie McInnes looked after him well. She is amusingly no-nonsense about authors, some of whom have been known to throw a “tanty” (a tantrum) if all is not precisely to their satisfaction. But Douglas, she says, was no problem. It was a massive tour, partly because he had put it off so often. He was popular and in great demand. He seemed genuinely interested in listening to what people were saying and he performed as graciously in tiny radio stations as he did in big telly studios. Debbie recalls:

He could take the piss out of himself very disarmingly. We did sixty-five interviews in five major cities in ten days. The radio stations had to fight over him. Douglas scarcely had a minute to breathe. The schedule was his punishment for being late. He couldn’t go to the shops, though he did buy two silver bangles in Perth airport, and he managed to get to a Mac World computer convention. He was passionate about that. He was desperate to go swimming with the dolphins off Palm Beach, but there was no time. He had a huge wetsuit that I ended up storing for him until the next time.

In the evenings he loved food and wine and was good company. He was a very warm person. Once [24 July 1988] we went to dinner with Ben and Sophie Elton [Sophie is an Australian saxophone player] who were in Perth for a tennis match.

We got on very well and the fans loved him. They were absolute devotees. The media loved him too—we all did. When he died, there was a huge piece in the
Sydney Morning Herald.
It was so sad.

Douglas had a great time in Australia, and then the promo tour took him to New Zealand. (Eurocentric Brits might say “nipped over to New Zealand” but in fact New Zealand is three hours flying time from Sydney.) It is a beautiful country, and Douglas was well looked after by Joan McKenzie, Linda Godley (the publicist) and the whole team at Whitcouls who ran New Zealand’s biggest bookselling operation. Jane remembers Douglas calling her from Auckland and describing the Rush Minute—the Kiwi equivalent of the rush hour in more congested cities.

Douglas actually enjoyed promotion tours. Many authors love the initial ego boost, but then settle down to a steady note of plangent whingeing, for a good tour is exhausting and a bad one has huge potential for humiliation. Australia was not the only important market he visited. He went to Germany and the other German-speaking markets of Austria and Switzerland in 1991, 1994, 1995 (when he toured for a week), 1998 and 2000.

But back to tax exile and 1988. Douglas spent much of the rest of that year travelling with zoologist Mark Carwardine and doing the research for what was to become an important and inspirational book (the next chapter is devoted to it). But at the end of 1988 he returned to Australia and rented a large house with its own swimming pool in the millionaires’ resort of Palm Beach on the northern beaches of Sydney. Kerry Packer had a place almost next door. At the height of the southern summer it’s usually too stifling to do much except drink ice-cold beer and wonder if it’s too hot for sex, but over this particular Christmas rain came down like something out of the Old Testament. Even so, it was a lot warmer than London.

Douglas was never much good on his own, so he invited a gang of friends to join him for Christmas. The deal was that they’d have to pay their own fares, but the accommodation would be on him.

Flying into Sydney shortly thereafter were Rick Paxton and Heidi Locher, then Jon Canter, Sarah Mason, an old friend, Ron Cobb, the film designer, Lou Stein, who was in theatrical management, John Lloyd, and finally Annie Watts and Peter Bennett-Jones—who subsequently married each other. (Peter, when he is not nursing Comic Relief, runs a successful management company with more than a fair share of the best comedians in the UK and also an independent TV production company.) It was a collection of the brightest and best—and they were poised to have fun. Only Douglas was a bit low, for he was preoccupied with his emotional predicament and could talk about its complexities—given the slightest encouragement—at interminable length. Indeed he could be uncharacteristically boring. Annie Watts was the best listener.

Peter Bennett-Jones says:

Douglas was looking for people to keep him company really. It was genuine generosity. Of course, he had lots more money than anybody else, but still, if you’re not generous you don’t do things like that. In fact, you probably do it less in my experience. I also thought he was very generous in his attitude to other people’s potential and success.

The weather was just unlucky really, so we went to lots of restaurants and spent a few days in Sydney. He [and John Lloyd] did some work on
The Deeper Meaning of Liff.

Rick recalls that John Lloyd was in a mercurial mood that Christmas, full of charm, stroppiness and alcohol, and that he had taken on a (thank God, temporary) alternative personality known as Jack Bastard.

Douglas had told everybody they should bring no presents. Absolutely NO PRESSIES was the rule. However, when the guests arrived they found to their embarrassment that he had installed a Christmas tree and furnished everybody with an extravagant gift. By way of thanks they clubbed together and hired a seaplane to take the party for Christmas lunch to the Berowra Waters Inn, at the time only accessible by small boat or seaplane. It is now no more, but in the decadent eighties it was
the
place to go for an indulgent and very expensive lunch. Their Christmas meal was indeed a long, extravagant blow-out; the hope was expressed that they had not taken in so many extra calories that the seaplane would be overburdened. Rick reports that a certain amount of jocular muttering from the other guests was audible as they left. Who are these scruffy pommy bastards who came by bloody seaplane?

Douglas’s house guests stayed about two weeks. His next return to Australia would be with Jane, for scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef, an experience he described as being as near to paradise as he could imagine. Meanwhile, it was time to return to London and Real Life.

••••••

Some readers may be wondering by now if the writing continued to become more difficult and whether Douglas ever reached Four on the Beaton Scale. Alas, he did.
Mostly Harmless
(1992) was unmitigated grief. Douglas was convinced that he simply could not do it any more. In 1991 his stepfather, Ron Thrift, a thoroughly decent man respected and loved by all, had died of cancer. It just seemed to happen for no reason. (The book, dedicated to Ron, begins with Zen resignation: “Anything that happens, happens . . .”) Where, if anywhere, was meaning? All his life Douglas was looking for it—and if people die because of nothing, just a predicament of matter, and you are too bright to embrace the spurious comforts of faith, there’s little left to fall back on. Creatively, too, Douglas was exhausted by the whole
Hitchhiker’s
idea. He’d been doing it for fifteen years despite every effort to stop. In spirit he had long since moved on.

Mostly Harmless
is the most solipsistic of all Douglas’s books. Without wanting to be too solemn—for the story is full of good jokes—there is the sense throughout the story that Arthur is not sure if anything exists outside himself. Every individual’s universe is defined by his or her sense data. Even the seer says so:

“You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself.”