Clive James, celebrity and getting published

I have recently been reading North Face of Soho by Clive James, which I believe is the fourth in his largely auto-biographical series which began with Unreliable Memoirs. It was, as always with Clive James, a hugely entertaining read, but to my mind none of the successors have had the same impact as that first one, perhaps because it seemed at the time (and indeed probably was) such a different and refreshing book to anything else one had read. I can remember reading it on holiday one year and laughing out loud every few minutes. He is the master of the deadpan throwaway line, a technique I have shamelessly tried to copy in my own writing. I think my favourite one went something like this: "As I got out of her car, I arranged to meet her again the next day. It seemed the least I could do considering I had just been sick in the glove compartment of her 2CV."

I have also been reading The Meaning of Recognition (like North Face of Soho, borrowed from the excellent Swiss Cottage library)and here I have a bit more of a problem. TMR is a collection of essays and I took it out to read because the same author's Cultural Amnesia is one of my favourite books of all time. Frankly, TMR disappoints. CA was a collection of essays on key figures (though some not that well known, at least in the UK) of the twentieth century, and was an example of that wonderful eclectic mix of wit, erudition, insight and humanity that James does so well. It ranged across just about every art form, delved into the big issues of the last century, and was by turns enlightening, funny and touching.

TMR is none of these things. Perhaps it is because he restricts himself largely to the more popular media such as Television, though he also gets into subjects as diverse as contemporary politics and Grand Prix racing. Even the two I thought I would enjoy the most, on Huxley and Flaubert, were strangely unsatisfying. There are some flashes of the old brilliance (a novel, he says, "is a register of the mind's adventures, not of the memory's contents") but far too much of it feels like an old professional journalist knocking out his copy.

While CA would be on my list of ten all time favourite books, it had always struck me that there was an inconistency somewhere in it which troubled me, and it was only on reading something James said about celebrity in TMR, and them something about his own experiences in North Face of Soho which brought it home to me. He is rightly and understandably very hard on aspiring writers who contact him asking if he can introduce them to agents or publishers. Good books will always get published, he avers, since publishers have a whole team of people who do nothing but wade through the "slush pile" of unsolicited manuscripts, and sooner or later quality will out.

With due respect to James as a senior member of the London cultural world, this simply isn't true, and frankly I doubt if it ever was. We all know that Harry Potter was turned down by several publishers (Macmillan are rumoured still to be trying to find out who was responsible for this mega-gaffe at their end), and represents the rule, not the exception.

Fact: unless an author is represented by an agent then most pubslihers will not even return their phone calls or emails, let alone read their manuscript. Fact: publishers do not have whole teams of people who wade through their slush piles, unless an occasional summer intern qualifies. Fact: most publishers no longer even accept unsolicited proposals. Fact: publishing editors for the most part do not even have the power any more to decide which authors they would like to publish. Their sales people tell them what they want to sell, and the poor old editor then has to go out and find it. For the most part, of course, "what they want to sell" means some piece of nonsence ostensibly written by a "celebrity" and/or a "TV spin-off".

James is very hard on the cult of "celebrity" which has grown up around the world of television and rightly draws a distinction between people who are "recognised" in the sense that their face may have appeared on the TV screen from time to time, and people who are "recognised" as being possessed of some unusual talent, or being eminent in their chosen field of study. It was only when I read his decsription of persuading a reluctant publisher to accept his idea for Unreliable Memoirs that the penny finally dropped. If he is honest, he will admit (because he says as much in North Face of Soho) that the only reason the book got accepted for publication was because he was at the time a well known TV celebrity. If he had not been, then he would have been able to experience at first hand the frustration of knowing that you have written a piece of quality work, but that nobody is going to give you the time of day to discuss it, far less to read it.

Recognition comes in many guises, but the sad fact today is that one is unlikely to become recognised as a writer, since in order to become a writer in the first place you need already to be recognised.

Deadly Waters by Pauline Rowson

Pauline Rowson kindly sent me a copy of Deadly Waters, the second in her series of DI Horton detective stories set in and around the town and harbour of Portsmouth on the south coast of England. I really enjoyed reading this book. The plot is well crafted, there is a good sense of place, and there are some fascinating conflicts within the police establishment which are doubtless to be exploited to the full in future books in the series. If you're looking for a new detective to add to your bookshelves, The Tide of Death, the first in the series, would be a good place to start.

Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

With Lord Jim, as with many of Conrad’s books, the background is surely auto-biographical. In describing Jim’s background he tells of precisely the sort of experiences of seagoing and sitting masters’ and mates’ exams that Conrad himself knew. Much of the material from the Bangkok trilogy, for example, (Falk, The Secret Sharer and The Shadow Line, a definite trilogy though written at different times in his life, and only the last as a full novel) is thought to be lifted straight from his very earliest experiences of seafaring in Asia, with little more then the names having been changed.

Jim is first mate of the “Patna”, but when danger looms he abandons ship in panic, abandoning his crewmates to the unknown. This single moment of cowardice comes to define his life as he seeks atonement or, as a religious rather than a humanist novelist might have put it, redemption. Finding himself a white man in the tropical jungle, the Lord Jim of the title, he seeks to regain his lost honour, even at the expense of needlessly sacrificing his own life in recompense for a broken promise.

So far, so good. What I have just outlined could be the staple fare of any 1900 melodrama, replete with colourful native characters, heroic derring-do and a determined, noble sacrifice made in pursuance of the white man’s burden. Except, of course, that Conrad is an incomparably greater writer than that, perhaps even the greatest English novelist ever, and certainly the greatest of his time. His contemporaries included Wells, Conan Doyle, Ford/Hueffer, James, Galsworthy, and Bennett, all of whom he knew, incidentally, and many of whom formed a circle of writers who all lived within a few miles of each other on the south coast at places such as Sandgate (Wells), Rye (James) and Winchelsea (Ford/Hueffer and, at various times, Conrad). Yet though Galsworthy would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, a decision that seems difficult to justify today, and Conan Doyle would perhaps sell more books than all of them put together, it is in my view Conrad who has the strongest claim to greatness.

There are certain composers whose music sounds unmistakeably their own, as well as something that nobody else could possibly have written, and perhaps something that nobody else will ever emulate; Wagner would be an obvious example. So it is with literature. In modern times one might think of the Rushdie of Midnight’s Children, or the Durrell of The Alexandria Quartet, for example, but with Conrad this is true perhaps even more so than with any other writer. T.E. Lawrence said that Conrad wrote in paragraphs rather than sentences, and that his books always felt much bigger then they really were. That is why he has always been a novelist’s novelist; apart from his contemporaries, who instantly recognised his genius, his fans have included Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, Kinglsey Amis, A.N. Wilson and Graham Greene. Greene, indeed, was so obsessed with Conrad that on his travels he used deliberately to target hotels where Conrad himself had stayed, and insist on being given the same room.

Conrad speaks to us down the generations of the essential human condition. Jim, having literally jumped ship from one world, tries to construct another for himself, one in which he plays a part of the “tuan”, the “Lord Jim” of the title. Life, as Conrad knew, is composed of fresh starts and new directions as individuals try to rebuild their lives to move away from past troubles. Usually, of course, they are ultimately unsuccessful, as is the case inevitably with Jim.

“Then Jim understood. He had retreated from one world, for a small matter of an impulsive jump, and now the other, the work of his own hands, had fallen upon his head … without a word, he came out of his room and sat before the long table, at the head of which he was accustomed to regulate the affairs of his world, proclaiming daily the truth that surely lived in his heart … the girl he loved came in and spoke to him, but he made a sign with his hand and she was awed by the dumb appeal for silence in it. She went out onto the veranda and sat on the threshold, as if to guard him with her body from dangers outside.”

This is a perfect example of Conrad’s unique prose style. It speaks of simple, almost mundane actions, yet it does so in a way which brings out the true hopelessness of the human condition, and transforms the trivial into the tragic, the mawkish into the overpoweringly emotional.

There are those who feel this represents an essentially negative view of the world, one in which there are few happy endings. A world in which there is ultimately but one pre-ordained ending, which is rarely happy for anyone, and in which the only comfort for which one can hope is that one might reach that ending at least without havng learned the true awfulness of which man is capable. Remember that by the time of Lord Jim Conrad had already written Heart of Darkness, perhaps the most influential work of fiction in the English language, with Kurz’s famous last words echoing as its ending: “the horror, the horror!”

In fact Conrad’s world view is not so bleak as some would have it. From the female characters in both Lord Jim and Victory we can surmise that, like Goethe, Wagner and Schopenhauer, he believes in the redemptive power of human love. It is Conrad’s greatness that he also recognises, and ruthlessly portrays, the constant ability of the male of the species, of whom Jim is a perfect example, to spurn their last chance of happiness without even really understanding why they are doing so.

He also recognises that life is not just transient but fragmentary. Any single life is but a passing moment in the totality of existence, but that life itself is divided up into a number of fragments which may or may not seem connected, and which simply blur into each other. Death, when it comes, is merely another such moment.

“There is never time to say our last word – the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submission, revolt.” (Lord Jim)

It is this view, and his ability to express it at an almost subliminal level in his wonderful prose style, that sets Conrad apart, and gives him that ability to echo down the ages as the definitive portrayer of the essential human condition. Forget the exotic foreign locations, the sea-going tales and the colourful natives, for they are but theatrical props. What matters is his ability to communicate that life is essentially trivial, the odds against individual success huge, and that depravity or even simple chance are always likely to triumph over efforts at heroism, nobility or greatness. Yet none of this really matters, since that one pre-ordained ending will suddenly represent simply the next moment, will come, and be gone again. The last word is never uttered.

As one of Conrad’s biographers, John Stape, puts it:

“resolutely refusing to pronounce that ‘last word’, Conrad speaks for an awareness of fragmentation so quintessentially modern that his voice, a century and a half after his birth, remains powerful and authoritative … his essential loneliness and sense of the horror of existence (found) existence in highly wrought prose and in fiction of coruscating insight…”

Yes.

"Major Benjy" back on the best-seller list

Major Benjy has briefly re-appeared in the best-seller lists (#54 in historical fiction, into which category Amazon have rather quaintly put it). I think this could have something to do with an article in the Ham and High last week, which may have prodded the book-puchasing classes of London NW3 into action.

Two bits of news

First, let us rejoice that there is a new Fred Vargas book available in English, The Chalk Circle Man. I suppose we should be thankful for small mercies, but why on earth could they not have translated them in the right order? This is actually the first in the Adamsberg series.

Second, clcking here should take you to a working URL for my talk at the Sunday Times Literary Festival in Oxford on 1st April. It's principally about E.F. Benson, though onviously my own Mapp and Lucia book Major Benjy may get a passing mention ...