Memoirs of a Private Man (37 page)

Our immediate plan, made in England, was, after ten days in Sydney, to hire a car and drive along the coast as far as Terrigal Bay and then Salamander Bay. The weather pursued us to Terrigal Bay. Intense heat, which made a number of factories in Sydney close down, was accompanied by strident winds. When we arrived there we were determined to bathe; but no sort of protection from the sun could survive on the beach in that gale, so all we could do was to undress in the bedroom of our hotel, tug at the front door until it came open (to slam violently behind us as soon as we had been blown through) and stagger onto the beach, plunge into the warm sea and immediately, to avoid sunstroke, stagger back to the protection of the hotel.

This was the last day of the heatwave. Overnight the temperature dropped from 102 º to 52º and all the next day, and for the next six days, lashing rain fell. (At the next place, Salamander Bay, which was a motel, water was running down the inside walls of our bedroom when we arrived. Not the ideal habitation for a woman whose temperature was slightly exceeding that of Sydney when we left.)

Terrigal Bay is – or then was – really little more than a group of hotels and motels and shops and dwelling houses arranged round the rather splendid bay where one may, one hopes, bathe and sunbathe at one's leisure. When it is raining there is virtually nothing to do. Jean, with a true sense of the priorities, decided to have her hair done. While she was in the salon I sat in the bar and got into conversation with another Englishman, similarly stranded, though I never learned what had brought him there in the first place.

When Jean emerged from her salon an hour and a half later and came up to me I smiled at her vaguely and, not at all vaguely, gestured her to make herself scarce. The man was telling me his life story.

It was such an extraordinary story that I should have gone straight upstairs afterwards and written it all down. Stupidly I did not, but enough of it remained in my memory, and some of it was riveting.

One of the problems of life is that truth is so much stranger than fiction that when one uses it as fiction it seems too bizarre to be true. Among a number of things he told me was that when estranged from his wealthy wife he was invited to her birthday party at the Dorchester Hotel, and he went along feeling this to be the first move towards a reconciliation. When he got there he found all the other eighteen guests were men, and they were all homosexuals.

This scene appears in
The Green Flash.
I hope it convinces. The character of David Abden in the novel owes something to that meeting in Terrigal Bay, but it derives from other men as well. Many have thought him a finely drawn character. Many have disliked him.

So after eighteen months or so I returned to the idea that only a book using the perfumery business as its basis would be suitable for the novel I wanted to write. When I rang Desmond Brand and told him, he was pleased and surprised to hear from me again. In the meantime I had despaired of doing anything with it at all, and had strenuously considered a variety of other stories which might be developed. I would get so far with this or that idea but then across their path would come the story of Shona and David. It blocked the way completely for anything else I hoped to write. I had to get it out of my system.

There were infinite problems, other characters looming, other incidents log-jamming the way ahead. Because of the growth of another character, I had to study fencing and went to fencing schools to see people at work, consulted a master fencer. Scotland featured in it largely, and I did not know the social life and habits of the sort of class from which David Abden derived. The seedy and criminal side of the perfumery world became involved, and Scotland Yard consulted, and the courts. So it went on. But the mere mechanics of research were simple and easy compared to the battle between the characters and the manoeuvring of events so that the characters should have full play.

When I delivered the typescript to Collins their response was more than enthusiastic. Ian Chapman, then still chairman, took the typescript to Venice and rang me from there telling me that this was the novel he had been waiting twenty years for me to write. He said: ‘I hope you'll write much more, of course, but if you never wrote another word, this is it.' Others were equally delighted, including Sam Vaughan, the chief editor of Random House in New York. So all the barometers were set fair.

The first wobbling of the high-pressure system came when the editor who dealt with Random House paperbacks said she did not want it for their own paperback division. And the book's eventual reception both in England and America was mixed. It was well reviewed and pleased a lot of people. I had letters from semi-friends and acquaintances who had never written to me before, other authors among them, and who seemed to see in this book what I had hoped readers would see. But a mass of ordinary readers did not care for it. It was never a big seller even by my standards.

Do I regret this? Of course. Very much. Sales are not all that important; but quite a number of my own personal friends did not like it. Nobody has ever been able to tell me why. The nearest I have ever come to solving this mystery was when a retired film producer friend of mine (who was a tremendous admirer of the book) sent it to a young director friend of his who happened to be one of the successful men of the moment. The director replied to the effect that this was a fine novel but he would not want to make it into a film because the hero was such a shit.

A number of women, especially young ones, have hinted at the same opinion, and one day I made a detailed inventory of David Abden's misdeeds. He is a boy who when he is ten is being bullied by his drunken father and hits his father with a poker and accidentally kills him. This guilt, part conscious, part subconscious, stays with him all his life: he turns to petty crime until he meets Shona and from there on, resentfully, grudgingly, rebelliously, chooses to go straight. Tragedy haunts him and he is involved in another accidental killing; but all through his life his bark is worse than his bite. Having been very much against the police, he comes to work for them. Joining forces with Shona and becoming her lover is all a calculated form of self-advancement, but he finds himself in the end working genuinely for the perfumery business and genuinely unable to separate himself from this older woman whom he finds he truly loves. He is a character, one would think, who seems to merit sympathy rather than dislike.

For many readers it works this way, but for many more it does not.

After the Act
is another book which didn't take off in any general way, but I understand why this is and accept it. It is one of my favourite novels.
The Green Flash
still puzzles me. My publishers assure me that it will continue to make its way in the world.

The origins of
Stephanie
, published in August 1992, go back, as usual, a long way. For a good many years I have known two men, both now elderly, who while vastly different in most ways, have one thing in common: they were ‘ war heroes'. One of them had been parachuted into France, blew up bridges, fought with the Maquis, was captured and tortured, and later was involved in action in North Africa and the Far East. Yet for all the time I had known him, he was the gentlest of men. The other was in the Parachute Regiment, fought with great bravery and the utmost recklessness all through the war and – it is said – ran himself into further debt every leave because he did not expect to survive. He is not now such a gentle man as the first but is quiet, courteous and shy.

It seemed to me that both these men illustrated a peculiar paradox: that for a short time a human being can become a trained killer, and then when that short term is over, can return to the fold, sober, law abiding, reliable, as if nothing had happened. (These are not ordinary soldiers, where the change is not so extreme, but the real killers.) And I put to myself the question: if in later life a situation should arise when violence was again justifiable – not in another war but in their own lives – would they briefly revert to what they had been in their youth?

For some years also I have had a club friend who is the chief police surgeon at Heathrow and deals exclusively with the smuggling of drugs. We talked a lot. Chiefly he talked and I listened. I began to study the drug question, interviewed people, trying to see all around it. On one of my frequent visits to India I happened to meet a drug dealer in Bombay. So it all began.

In the course of the writing I came to use only one of my war-hero friends; the other turned into the man I call Henry Gaveston, who came from a different source altogether. I intended there should be quite a lot of humour in this book, chiefly in the conversations between the two men, but this perished because the novel as it eventually evolved was not suitable for it.

This, as I hope readers will have realized, has not been intended as a chronological memoir. Somewhere along the line – it must have been early 1983 – I was awarded an OBE in the New Year's Honours List.

It was a very pleasant surprise, and I much appreciated being appreciated.

The day the awards were made was sunny but cold. Buckingham Palace was as usual warmly welcoming and magnificent, everything arranged in the most precise detail. The band played its soothing, elegant tunes. The only discordant note came from a tall elderly man next to me who, having received his medal, looked down at it and observed: ‘It says here for god and empire. Well, I know the Empire's dead. I'm not sure, but I wonder a bit about God.'

Whatever else, wit at least survives. Recently I was in the Savile Club and got into conversation with two other old men. We fell to discussing prices before and during World War II, and where we were accustomed to stay when we were in London.

The first man said: ‘ I always went to one of the Waverley group. They were good value and comfortable.'

‘ Yes,' I agreed. ‘ I usually stayed in Bloomsbury too. The Lincoln Hall. It was Blitzed during the war.'

Third man said: ‘I always stayed at the Cumberland.'

First man gave a guffaw. ‘Oh, that was known as the Tart's Hotel. You only had to ring …'

‘ I always took my wife there,' the third man said stiffly.

The first man raised an eyebrow. ‘Did you have to pay corkage?'

I have called this book
Memoirs of a Private Man
, for this is always what I have wanted to be. In the early days the press were not interested in me, but later sometimes they very much have been, and I have always been intensely uncomfortable under their scrutiny and tried to duck whatever I could.

My second publisher once said to me that if I wanted to avoid publicity I had chosen the wrong profession.

A few years ago I lent some support to Stephen Spender in his pleas for discretion in the publication of his letters after he was dead, urging that they could give unnecessary distress to people still living and to his own family.

I did not know whether Stephen Spender wanted or needed my support. (I had known him to say ‘Hello' to for more than thirty years, but oddly enough I do not think we exchanged more than a sentence all that time.)

Kirsty McLeod in the
Daily Telegraph
argued that ‘As for the great man himself: be he painter or writer, he has – despite what Spender says – been trying to draw attention to himself from the very moment he first picked up a paintbrush or wielded a pen.' And in a letter in reply in the
Telegraph
I totally disagreed. She did not make – and many people do not make – the distinction between an author's work and an author's private life. Of course authors want publicity for their work – it is their life blood – but not every author wants to parade his personal private doings, or even his personal appearance, before the public. Some do. Some adore it. To be seen about and recognized! To be feted! To be followed by the press! To be asked for their opinion, to go to fashionable dinner parties, to go round publicizing their latest novel! It's heaven. But for some it's hell, and we should be allowed to choose. Some do choose: four such are, or were, Graham Greene, John Fowles, John Le Carré, William Golding.

How far Stephen Spender sought or shrank from personal publicity I do not know; what he was arguing for in this case was that his personal letters, written when a young and no doubt impetuous man, should not be bandied about and analysed by any Paul Pry who came along after his death and fancied displaying his Freudian prowess. I will not, I imagine, ever be famous enough to attract this form of tabloid journalism, but even if I were as notable as Conrad or Hemingway there would be little about my private life which would merit the unearthing. As I have said in the preface, although I have had a modest share of sinfulness, it has been too ordinary, straightforward and unmuddied by complexes or fixations. I have had one wife, and I loved her and she loved me. I did not terrorize, browbeat or woefully neglect my children. I have never frequented public lavatories. I do not get drunk and disorderly. All very dull.

And I do not want to go to literary lunches, open fetes, give readings of my books, or otherwise appear in the public eye. I have by now written a great many novels, and must through them have surely revealed a fair amount of my own nature and personal feelings. Let that suffice.

Tolstoy says somewhere: ‘There is no point in visiting a great writer, because he is incarnate in his works.' Should this not to some extent be true of the less important writer? Even down to the least important of all?

A few years ago, after reading through a novel I had just finished, I wrote these few lines. Maybe they sum up something of my philosophy, and act as a suitable envoi to this book:

Perfection is a full stop.
Give me the comma of imperfect striving,
Thus to find zest in the immediate living.
Ever the reaching but never the gaining,
Ever the climbing but never the attaining
Of the mountain top.