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

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СКАЧАТЬ turning the Diaries into a book. If so, Faber would take great pleasure in publishing it.

      I still have the letter. It is on loan, with my other manuscripts, to the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

      The first question readers ask writers is, What sort of routine do you have?

      The second is, How did you begin to write?

      To these questions – and others, such as, How do you discipline yourself? – there are various answers, depending on the writer and the time of day. Mostly readers hope to be astonished: You mean to say you write only in leap years? Routine is a hateful word. I’m a failed Bohemian, and write when and if I can. Which is most days.

      I cannot remember when I was not making books. At my mother’s knee I was encouraged to collect pictures from magazines, to give them captions and bind them up with pieces of wallpaper for covers.

      This aided my pictorial sense. Also helpful was the family’s Hobbies fretwork machine. On this machine, Mother made jigsaws from pictures stuck on to three-ply, simple jigsaws at first, then of increasing difficulty as my sister and I grew up.

      My mother read to me before I could read. One of the first stories I ever read myself was in the old Daily Mail. A girl who lost her shadow had to travel round the world to find it. The theme touched me so closely that I coloured the illustration. Mother preserved the picture, and somehow it has survived the years.

      At the tender age of seven, I was sent away to boarding school. In the junior dormitory, with its hurly-burly, I found a way of preserving my identity. I told stories.

      All new boys had to tell stories. They were made to stand up on their beds and spout. If the story did not please, or the storyteller faltered, shoes were thrown at him. I never had a shoe lifted against me.

      Soon I became champion storyteller. There was just one snag: talking was forbidden after Lights Out. The housemaster, Bonzo, had a spyhole by the door. He would rush in, cane in hand, switching on all the lights at once.

      ‘Who’s talking?’

      Reluctantly, I would raise my hand.

      The punishment was six strokes on the bum, laid on with vigour across the pyjamas. I have never met with quite that kind of criticism since, though in the comments of many critics one hears a nasty little housemaster longing to get loose.

      That dormitory ritual of narrative. It was impossible to stamp out, so valuable was it. It warded off homesickness and night fears. Something very primitive was evoked when telling stories to a silent dorm.

      My stories were of a lurid variety. Many of them were SF. I derived them from Murray Roberts’s stories of Captain Justice, which ran in a thirties magazine, Modern Boy. And I did all the voices. Justice, Midge, O’Reilly and Professor Flaznagel.

      Later, at a better school, West Buckland in North Devon, I graduated, or perhaps declined, from verbal to written stories. They became more ambitious, less derivative. Our form was mad about Sellers & Yeatman – not just 1066 and All That, but the less popular titles such as Horse Nonsense and Garden Rubbish. I wrote my own version, ‘Invalids and Illnesses’, which was popular. But my great success was with a series of pornographic stories told in Americanese. Each title came with a one-sentence blurb, in the manner of American pulp magazine stories of the forties. The titles of those stories have gone from my head; only two of the blurbs remain: ‘They went to New York for a change of obscenery’, and ‘The editor’s incision was final’ (he died ‘on the job’, as it was then called).

      These stories brought me into even greater danger than the oral tales. Had they been discovered in one of the periodical raids carried out on our desks, I should have been beaten and expelled. But the writing madness was in my veins. I also wrote comic stories and SF stories, which I collected into books. These earned me the exemption from school essays I have described.

      This experience, valuable as it was in confirming that people might listen, was interrupted by war service. For four years I was out of England, four formative years from eighteen till almost twenty-two, a not uncommon experience for my generation. Out of England and out of the class system and the stream of English thought. I left the country a mere boy and returned as an adult. In those years, 1944–48, England also had changed. Pre-war England had gone for ever.

      Nowadays, the trauma of being involved in war, or in any kind of catastrophe – a rail accident, say – is better understood than it was. We understand how necessary it may be to talk through a trying experience, just as young lovers whisper to their partners all the shortcomings of their parents. Confession is the way to mental stability.

      In Burma, stuck in the jungle with Japanese forces only a few miles away, the older men spoke fiercely of how they would ‘grip’ their audiences when they returned home, relating their sufferings. Like the Ancient Mariner, they intended to tell all: in the hope of release from trauma, which was also the Ancient Mariner’s ambition. Just as the wedding guest tried to evade the long and tiresome story, I’m sure all of us in the ‘Forgotten Army’ in Burma found our friends at home, when we returned, just as reluctant to listen. We may also have discovered that some experiences could hardly attain speech.

      For some years, when I was reinstated in that baffling place, England, I had nightmares in which the Japanese were advancing on me with bayonets fixed. Writing was a form of exorcism.

      During demobilisation leave, I sat down to write my first novel. It was to be called ‘Hunter Leaves the Herd’ and would tell England what the Far East was like. It was about a deserter from the army. It never got written. I had not the equipment at the time to write a whole novel.

      I took my typewriter and went up to Oxford to get a job. When interviewing me, Mr Sanders said, ‘Which contemporary novelist is your favourite?’

      I do not know why I did not say Aldous Huxley or Evelyn Waugh (who had not then gone off the gold standard with Brideshead Revisited). I said ‘Eric Linklater’, as being more down to earth.

      Later, Sanders said to me, ‘You know, I’d never heard of Linklater.’

      But Linklater, with his bawdy sense of humour and jaunty narrative, was for many years a great favourite. I collected all his novels, plays and stories; they left my shelves only when my old home broke up.

      After ‘The Hunter Leaves the Herd’ died on the vine, I wrote nothing but poetry, most of it inspired by the girls I met in Oxford. Then came ‘Shouting Down a Cliff’.

      While on holiday in the Isle of Wight, I bought from a newsagent an SF magazine called Nebula, published in Glasgow, and read it on the beach. The stories were so amateur I knew I could do better, though I admired one by Bob Shaw. I had an acceptance from Peter Hamilton, the editor. It took him over three years to publish the story: called simply ‘T’ – it remains my shortest title – it was finished on 30 January 1953. I received Hamilton’s cheque in January 1955, and the story was published in November 1956. (One keeps such details of early stories; later stories are less slavishly documented.) By the end of November 1956 my career was launched. My first book had been published by Faber & Faber and a second one was in the works.

      I needed to see inferior writing in order to encourage myself that I could do better. I knew no one, took no advice. To work in a bookshop is to know a world already full of books.

      The title of my second book was Space, Time and Nathaniel. It was a collection of SF short stories. The title was distinctive, announcing СКАЧАТЬ