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

Jack Cassidy and John Moffatt, so good in Restoration comedy.

      Those were years of revelation for me. Every day brought new discoveries. I fell into books in my eagerness to catch up on all those years lost in the sun. History, philosophy, psychology, biography, literature, art: the bookshop became my library. When Sanders promoted me to buyer of new books, I ordered from publishers whatever interested me. I believed that if I filled the shop with books I liked I would have no difficulty in selling them. It was intoxicating to stock up with any book I wanted. Sanders must have been crazy to give me my head as he did.

      Many writers I have loved since that time, among them Lewis Mumford, Benjamin Robert Haydon (I was directed to him by Aldous Huxley), Logan Pearsall Smith, Kafka – on, the list goes on – and two poets who were at that time Oxford favourites, John Donne and T. S. Eliot. Donne and Eliot have proved of lasting interest, poets who can always be turned to. And there were others, some of whom have failed to gain universal approval, like Roy Campbell. A line or two of Roy Campbell went into Helliconia Spring, just as Tourneur went into Eighty-Minute Hour.

      There was much to please. And a dilemma. Reality consisted of several conflicting umwelts partially overlapping. It might be codified as four boxes. The top box contains Bookshop, Commerce, Prison; the rest contain ideas of University, Science Fiction, Freedom, Creativity, Travel.

      I was in the top box. How was I to gain possession of all four boxes?

      A frantic division of energies filled those few hours when I was free of Sanders. Food, women and writing were in competition. In the room at 13 King Edward Street, I generally worked on worthless poems and verse plays under the one central light. I had several girlfriends, most of them as poor as I, most of them content with a visit to the cinema and an hour or two in a snug waste-paper house accessible at the end of Sanders’ side passage, to which fortunately I had a key.

      The need for food was pressing. When I arrived in Oxford, several British Restaurants were in existence. They disappeared one by one as their task of catering to a wartime workforce was fulfilled. One restaurant stood on an old coal wharf by the canal which was later filled in to become part of the ground on which Nuffield College now stands.

      The British Restaurant in the Town Hall was always well attended. Queues sometimes stretched down the imposing staircase to the entrance doors and beyond, into St Aldate’s, but they moved quickly. Many students ate there. It was a good place to pick up girls. Everyone was friendly in a sort of post-war way, and the ladies who served there knew their regulars. A three-course meal cost 1s. 3d. (pronounced one-and-three, or seven pence by present currency).

      What was the main course? Sometimes it was Vienna Steak. We have all adapted to change. Even what goes into our stomachs has changed. Today, the Vienna Steak is extinct. The term was a euphemism for rissole. It came with thick gravy and mashed potato and an unheard Strauss waltz. As night gives way to day, so the Vienna Steak gave way to the Hamburger.

      And the question I asked myself was, whether I was stuck for ever in Sanders’ shop with the taste of Vienna Steak in my mouth. There was no one to rescue me, unless I could make those marks on paper make sense.

      Those restaurants were very utilitarian, more like 1984 than one cared to mention. When Indian restaurants opened in England, they were thrice welcome. They did not make you ashamed of frayed cuffs, assuming from the start that you were poor and needed something peppy under your belt. When I first saw Indians and Chinese in Oxford, I followed them down the street, for the mere pleasure of the sight of them among all the pale Caucasian faces.

      So I wrote. At one of the first Faber parties I went to, I met John Bowen, now a big name in television. Bowen is a clever writer with a flair for fantasy; an early novel of his, After the Rain, was a successful science fiction novel. But he warned me at that party that there was no money to be made in writing SF. I remember his words: ‘You don’t want to have a bottle of Heinz salad cream on your table all your life, do you?’

      Often when I pour walnut oil or lemon on my salad, I think of Bowen – and that naughty, corrupting question of his.

      4

       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,