Bury My Heart At W. H. Smith’s. Brian Aldiss

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       Imaginary Diaries

      Here is how my first book came into being. A publisher stepped forward and asked me to write it. I never papered my room in King Edward Street with rejection slips. I don’t know what a rejection slip looks like. No wonder I have been so difficult ever since.

      Always have a change of scene with a new chapter. So here is another bookshop: Parker’s of Oxford. Sanders has fallen away underfoot. Parker’s paid fair wages and let its staff go at five thirty. I gained ten extra hours of liberty per week. Parker’s closed down in 1988, to make way for Blackwell’s art shop.

      I called a halt to poetry writing, and launched into short stories. Using the extra free time as an investment, I began to write a novel entitled ‘Shouting Down a Cliff’.

      ‘Shouting Down a Cliff’ took up two summers and all the time in between. It was written in two large hard-covered notebooks, in longhand, with one of those fountain pens containing a little rubber tube to hold the ink, predecessor of today’s cartridge pen. What rendered those pens obsolete was the dawn of cheap air travel in the sixties. At 30,000 feet, the old rubber-interior pens, under change in air pressure, would discharge their contents into one’s pocket.

      If ‘Shouting Down a Cliff’ is not a title which springs to mind as readily as, say, David Copperfield or Lord of the Flies, this is because it has never been published. I never even typed it out from the notebooks. It was never offered to a publisher. I was convinced before it was finished that it was scarcely up to scratch. A critical faculty is not the least of a writer’s gifts.

      Where ‘Shouting Down a Cliff’ differs from the novels of many other unpublished novelists working at that time in Oxford – everyone seemed to be at it – is that I finished it. It was complete. Eighty thousand words. Finito. I had seen it through.

      If I had written a novel I could do anything.

      ‘Shouting’ was about ordinary life, which held profound mysteries for me, and still does. I was reading Proust’s novel, with its astonishing aperçus, and, at the same time, devouring the science fiction magazines which abounded in the fifties, before the paperback revolution. After years of being exclusively faithful to Astounding, I was turning to Galaxy, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and If. Other magazines surfaced occasionally, Thrilling Wonder and Dynamic being my favourites. At this period I knew nobody else who read science fiction. For that matter, I knew nobody else who was reading Proust.

      In 1955, a considerable Proust exhibition was mounted in the Wildenstein Gallery in London. Of course I had the common ambition to imitate Proust, except that my terrific long novel would have scenes on Mars and the moons of Jupiter. It would be splendid and unprecedented. I went to the exhibition.

      The chief exhibit, displayed in long glass cases, was les cahiers, the final manuscript of A la recherche du temps perdu, all written in many exercise books. In the Master’s spidery hand.

      Never again did I write in longhand. This century certainly has its advantages, among which must be numbered the electronic typewriter, on which I am writing the first draft of this book, and the word-processor. Think not only of Marcel Proust but of poor Countess Tolstoi, who copied out War and Peace five times in longhand for her husband. In Cyrillic, too. No wonder their marriage was so awful. Take advantage of what technology has to offer.

      I bought a typewriter and became more professional. These days I also have a fax machine.

      Parker’s in my time was L-shaped. I worked in the Turl end with Don Chaundy. Whenever the door opened about lunch-time, we could smell the curry from the Taj Mahal restaurant opposite.

      The weekly journal of the book trade is, and was then, The Bookseller. Every week it filtered down the long vertical of the L and round the foot of the L to Chaundy and me. It got to us fairly speedily, because few of the staff bothered to read it.

      (God, I yawn to think of those days. Why aren’t I in New York, where the elevators sail upwards so fast and upwards is so much higher than elsewhere? Good old Manhattan, so different from Oxford …)

      Anyhow, The Bookseller ran a series of articles which supposedly covered every aspect of bookshop life, although there was nothing about actually working in a shop. I wrote to the editor, Edmond Segrave, explaining that the pale face of the assistant was the backbone of literary life, and so on.

      He wrote back inviting me to do an article for him. I did so in February 1954. It was so long that Segrave spread it over two issues. What a sensation! A bloody assistant having the cheek to string a few sentences together! Dark looks were cast at me in the trade.

      At this point, I grasped one of the essential points of fiction, that Pretence is needed as a bodyguard for poor ailing Truth. I wrote again to Mr Segrave, saying that the only way to present the reality of the bookselling experience was to dress it as fiction. I was prepared to write him an imaginary diary – to be entitled ‘The Brightfount Diaries’ – in six episodes, to be run in six successive issues, in order to put across what I meant.

      Much is owed to Mr Segrave. He summoned me to his offices in Bedford Square. He and his assistant, Miss Philothea Thompson, later to become editor, took me out to lunch. They agreed to run the ‘Diaries’, although The Bookseller in its long history had never before published fiction.

      Soon everyone in the book trade was reading and chuckling over ‘The Brightfount Diaries’.

      You see, reader, that that chapter on Sanders was not there just for padding or nostalgia, as you suspected. It was research material. Sanders was the model for Brightfount’s. I just made it funnier and changed the names of the guilty parties.

      ‘Brightfount’ became so popular that Mr Segrave kept me at it. He paid me, too. I met him once more, after his retirement, in a cheerful pub called The Little Mayfair, behind the London Hilton, and we had a drink together.

      While ‘Brightfount’ was in full spate, Mr Segrave forwarded fan letters to me, from booksellers and so on, at home and overseas. The Beck Book Company wrote from Adelaide, offering me a job. I had always wanted to visit Australia. At that time, prospects sounded good out there, while the UK economy was dying on its feet as usual. Letters were exchanged. I was preparing to go when a further letter revealed what Mr Beck had until then had the cunning to keep from me, that they wanted me to run the theology department. I stayed in Oxford.

      Many years later, my eyes beheld the solid brick-built glory of the Beck Book Company in situ. I reflected then, in a science-fictional way, on the parting of time-streams, and of the other Aldiss who nearly fled to Oz and took holy orders. That poor little pom never became a famous writer. But he was great on a surfboard.

      The next letter forwarded from The Bookseller changed my life. It came from the firm then considered the most elegant in London, Faber & Faber, publishers of T. S. Eliot. It said that Sir Geoffrey СКАЧАТЬ