Memoirs of a Private Man (23 page)

Those who have read
Poldark
'
s Cornwall
will remember the occasion a few years after the end of the war when a trim blackbearded young man in shabby clothes called at Treberran and asked me if I owned the Stamps Land in Perrancombe. I said I did. He explained that he was starting a small mine entirely on his own at Mithian and that parts of the waterwheel and the heads and lifters would be useful to him. Could he buy them? Although reluctant to part with this picturesque ruin, I told him he could have them without cost to himself except the transport. He was pleased at this, and we chatted for a few minutes. He was upset at the way Cornwall was getting spoiled, and felt it was largely the result of up-country folk coming into Cornwall and developing it for their own profit. He also expressed a grudge against up-country writers who wrote about the county and made money out of it all. Interested in this, I asked him if he had any particular writers in mind? He replied: ‘ Well, this chap Winston Graham, for instance.'

A quicker-witted man would no doubt have led him on; instead I blurted out my guilt at once. He did not see this as amusing, but neither was he at all embarrassed. After a few seconds of thoughtful staring he explained accusatively that he lived at Mingoose, and that since the early
Poldark
novels were published he had been much troubled by people coming around looking for Mingoose House, where in the novels the Treneglos family lives. ‘They come round my place Sat'day af'noons, Sunday mornings, looking for Mingoose House. There isn't no Mingoose House. There isn't no such place. Tis a proper nuisance!'

I did not tell him that, even if it had now vanished, there
had
been a Mingoose House. It is marked plainly on William Tunnicliffe's map of Cornwall of 1791, and the house is shown to be in the possession of one John Harris, Esq.

Instead, I apologized for being who I was, and he came to take a more favourable view of me. Had I ever been down a one-man mine? No, I said. ‘Then come Sunday af'noon, I'll show ' ee.' Which he did. It was clearly part of an old mine which he had redeveloped. The ladders were shaky and so in the end was I. Later we went back to his cottage for tea, and he played me hymn tunes on the organ he had built himself into the wall of the cottage.

In the
Poldark
novels he was Ben Carter, son of Jim and Jinny, who was in love with Clowance.

I wish it were as easy to pinpoint other characters I lifted from life. In a canvas as wide as the twelve
Poldark
novels, the number of characters is enormous and their variation, one from another, is enormous; but, looking back, there are relatively few cases in which I have drawn from a living original. It's as if, in the course of my life, I have encountered thousands of people and they have descended into a sort of cauldron of the subconscious, and some part of one or another has been selected or has surfaced to the conscious at the suitable time to be made into fictional flesh. I don't ever remember looking around in search of new personalities; they have always been available. But of course you must have an understanding of a character, you don't just feel
with
, you have to feel
in
. Empathy, not sympathy, even though what you find there is dislikeable.

Stories are another matter and are the subject of weeks, sometimes months, of agonizing indecision. That aunt of whom I have already written once said to me: ‘Oh, how I envy you. Stories come from you like plums falling from a laden plum tree.' If she but knew.

Names are often difficult. I have already written of how I came by the names of Poldark and Demelza. And Warleggan, from a village on Bodmin Moor, was a name which felt immediately right.

The area round which Nampara is centred is St Ann's, Perranporth, and partly of Crantock, chiefly West Pentire. It is meant as a composite picture, not to put onto an Ordnance Survey map. Various maps have been drawn by enthusiastic readers, and some of these have been brilliantly accurate. But while approving of them, I have never endorsed them without a disclaimer of responsibility. On the other hand, where actual towns exist, such as Truro, Falmouth, Redruth, I have tried to make them as accurate as research can achieve.

Digressing slightly, I often think that a good novelist is never altogether a free man and never quite a whole one. The stuff of his life is the stuff of his writing, and vice versa, and he can't escape. That is why, if things are going badly with his work, it is a constant nagging worry, however much he may appear to be enjoying himself. Conversely, when things are going well, it offers a constant warm retreat of the mind against boredom, annoyance and discomfort.

It could be said that an author is the most harmless form of schizophrenic. He lives for a substantial part of his time in a world of his own creation, even fantasy, but never – one hopes – loses track with reality. When he is the participator he is also, willy-nilly, the observer. While being attached, he is also detached. In one of his diaries Arnold Bennett confesses that when he went to see his mother when she was dying, parallel with his absolutely genuine grief some part of him was taking in the texture of the blankets, the smell of the oil lamp, the drip of liquid on the edge of the medicine bottle, the fly buzzing against the windowpane. In different mood Goethe admits that in the middle of one of his numerous love affairs he found himself tapping out the hexameters of his latest poem on the backbone of his new girlfriend.

The Cornish novels, twelve in all, not far off two million words, have occupied for better or worse a considerable part of my life. Over long periods they have been entirely quiescent, though never forgotten. After the first four, which covered in the writing only about eight years, there was the long gap of twenty years before I took them up again.

I was very doubtful then whether I could ever get back into the mood in which I had written
Poldark
, even if I wanted to. Life moves on. One becomes more cynical, more sophisticated – and one's work mirrors it. All through two decades I had received letters from readers asking me to continue the story. Friends similarly – especially, of course, Cornish friends. And the memory of that ‘possession' which had taken hold of me once or twice in the writing – especially in
Demelza
– still stirred. None of my modern novels had created this haunted sensation. But the modern novels gave me a lot of satisfaction in other ways, and were much more successful.

Since I returned to England I had had one success after another, and was still oppressed by the levels of taxation. I badly wanted to leave England again for this reason, but knew I could not – or would not. England, somewhere in England, I knew now, had to be my home. So after
Angell, Pearl and Little God
I found myself under a number of pressures. I had no need to make money for some years; my new publisher, Collins, were ardent admirers of the
Poldark
novels – readers' letters still came; and over and above all this, far more important than all this, was a growing desire and a curiosity to know what all these people would do after Christmas 1793, where I had left them for so long.

So a new novel,
The Black Moon
, was dated to begin on the 14th of February 1794, seven weeks after the end of
Warleggan
. Only in reality was there a gap of twenty years.

It was hard going to begin. The style seemed to be lost. I was trying to return to the eighteenth century and a family saga, a different, slower tempo, a rebirth of characters long since left behind. And although I didn't take too much account of this, I knew that by changing styles I should be disappointing as many readers as I pleased.

I have somewhere, writing before, described the return to Poldark as being as difficult as breaking the sound barrier. This is an exaggeration, but for some months I told no one except my wife what was going on, lest I should find the attempt beyond me and give it all up.

But after a few months the momentum came back; the characters had clearly only been latent, for they were active and lively from the start, almost as if they had never been neglected at all. They sprang up around me.

And the momentum increased, and the preoccupation took over. Halfway through I called to see my accountant one day and told him cheerfully that for a year or two I was ‘returning to my nonprofit-making activities', meaning the
Poldarks
. I told Ian Chapman, and he was delighted, for he and his wife Marjory had long been admirers of the first four books. (Not so the reps, who, for all their enthusiasm, rightly foresaw the difficulty they would have reselling a new/old style Winston Graham to the booksellers and the public, whose memory is usually short. And so it proved.)

Towards the end the novel seemed to take over my life – even though it was being written in Sussex, not Cornwall – and the intense absorption, exciting but exhausting, reached a climax in the last two weeks, when I sometimes wrote 4,000 words – in longhand – in a day.

When it was over and done with and after a decent interval, I began the sixth
Poldark, The Four Swans
. Irrespective of what reception
The Black Moon
might receive, there was no question now but that I must complete another sequence of these novels – though this time it was to be three books, not four; and my feeling was to write these straight through, not intersperse them with modern novels as had been done with the first four. A whole set of new characters had flooded into
The Black Moon
, and they demanded time and space to work out their own destiny.

For some years in a desultory way there had been interest shown by the film industry in the first four
Poldark
novels. A firm called Hemway – part-owned by David Hemmings, who later starred in the film of my novel
The Walking Stick
– had considered taking out an option and had tried to get a production team together. Then Ian Chapman handed the books to Robert Clark, the millionaire chairman of Associated British Pictures, and he at once declared an interest, which he never abandoned all his life.

I should say in the years that had passed since the first four were published, Ward, Lock had continued to keep them in print, and they had been selling, though very slowly. In 1950 I met Max Reinhardt, then married to Margaret Leighton, but soon after we met his marriage broke up, and in 1956, being a temporary bachelor, he invited me to go as his guest to the Publishers'Annual Congress, this year to be held in Florence and Rome. I accepted, and we had a wonderful time – the Italians, regardless of cost, putting on all the possible panoply of their rich country for the world's publishers, from a Palio staged specially for us at Siena and an opera in Florence at which Victoria de los Angeles sang, to an audience of the Pope in Rome.

I did not realize until too late that in fact the one species not represented at this teeming conference was an
Author
. I was the only one there, and I had no business there. I'm sure Max didn't care. We laughed and joked our way through eight days of festivities. Of some slight embarrassment to me was the assumption of the authorities that, as I was Mr Reinhardt's guest, I was probably Mrs Reinhardt. Publishers wore red labels, their wives received purple. I wore the purple. I had invitations to dress shows, beauty salons, hair stylists. I told Max I ought to be considered one of the Congress tarts.

With us on this adventure went Denys Kilham Roberts, Secretary General of the Society of Authors, and his wife Betty. Their marriage too was wobbling dangerously near the rocks, but at the time all went well.

A few weeks before leaving England I had sold the serial rights of my latest novel,
The Sleeping Partner
, to
John Bull
magazine. Just before I left, the editor wrote to tell me he liked the book so much he had decided to increase the payment by an extra 200 guineas. Talking to Max and Denys when we were in Florence I told them of this and added, ‘ It's enough to destroy one's lack of faith in human nature.'

The same day they were discussing the huge success Ralph Richardson and Peggy Ashcroft had recently had at Stratford in
Titus Andronicus
. I said, ‘ With a cast like that, it's money for old rape.'

So, briefly, I earned a reputation for wit. Two days later Denys Kilham Roberts introduced me to Marghanita Laski and said: ‘You'll know Winston as a novelist, of course. But he is also a very witty man.'

I was so embarrassed by this introduction that even my general tendency to see the funny side of things deserted me, and she and I talked soberly of Gothic and Renaissance churches and the Italian tendency to architectural flamboyance. Then she said magisterially: ‘Are you a member of PEN?' I said, no, and she said, ‘Oh, you
must
be.' So I meekly joined there and then. I have never regretted it, but I am sure no one can have guessed that my membership, stretching now over forty years, springs from a desire to appease Marghanita for turning out such a dull and unfunny man.

One day we were walking across the Piazza della Signoria and Max said to me: ‘You see that man ahead of us, that's Stanley Unwin. He's selling The Bodley Head. They say he wants £80,000 for it. Ridiculous!'

Three months later Max bought it.

Earlier he had said to me: ‘As you know, I own two publishing firms. They are agreeable occupations, and I have enough to live comfortably on and to treat them as a side issue. Or I could buy a large established publishing firm and take it as my full-time profession.' His purchase of the Bodley Head told me he had made his choice.

Less than a year later he came to stay with us in Cornwall, and walking on the beach one day he said: ‘ The Bodley Head has a fine backlist but I would like to add to it. Do you have any of your earlier novels which have gone out of print and would like to see republished?'

It happened that Ward, Lock had become discouraged by the falling sales of the four
Poldark
novels and had written to tell me they felt these books had reached the end of the road and they were allowing them to go out of print. The rights had therefore reverted. I hesitantly told Max of these books and invited him to have a look at them. He promised to do so. I told him that, as my other novels were doing so well, I would be quite happy to allow him to put them out on a little or no royalty basis if they suited him, because I was fond of the books and would like to see them in circulation again. When he returned to London and read the books he said he would be happy to publish. Of course he gave me a fair royalty.