The last month was a pleasing counterpoint to the early weeks, for Ima Bayliss let us stay in the thatch-roofed Primrose Cottage which she had the use of, at Manuden near Bishop’s Stortford. The countryside roundabout was a dream-England, fine spring weather recalling those first forays out of the hospital in Wiltshire eight years before. I sat in the front room facing the lane to begin writing again. Two months doing none had made life fairly insupportable, and for a few weeks I had as satisfying an existence as a writer could wish for.
Immersed in the works of Albert Camus, I was especially impressed by L’Homme Révolté, and the Gallic complexities of logic that went into the definition of the rebel’s state of mind. A novel to be called The Rats, in which I would clarify my reflections on life in England with the fresh eye of a returning exile, turned instead into a book-length poem, and developed into an attack on the mindless conformity and complacency of England in the 1950s. At my writing one day (or not writing, because at times I could do no more than look vacantly out of the window before me) I saw a youth in vest and shorts trotting by along the lane. On a clean sheet of paper I scribbled what seemed the beginning of a poem: ‘The loneliness of the long distance runner …’ No second line came, so the paper was put away, and more work done on The Rats.
Chapter Thirty-four
Back in Soller at the beginning of May, we unpacked books posted to ourselves from Manuden, and in spite of the dream-time in that village, it was like being home again, for there was no place I had lived in longer except Nottingham. I set to work revising Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, improving the style as well as shortening the book by some 50,000 words.
A Swiss woman explorer who lived in the valley, Colette Martin, had written about her travels in the Sahara with a St Bernard dog, and I translated sixty pages from French and sent them with her unique photographs of Bedouin women and desert scenery to a publisher in London. We agreed to go half and half on any cash from the project, having already received a few guineas from her article ‘Nomad Women in the Sahara’ which I placed in the Geographical Magazine. The package came back in double-quick time, and nothing further was done with it.
‘The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller’ was returned by the Hudson Review, and ‘The Fishing Boat Picture’ came back from another magazine. After the visit to England, which had not after all been so unsuccessful, I wanted to remain in my agreeable state of exile for as long as we could afford to do so. Majorca was where we lived, and it was impossible not to be content in such a place. Ruth was earning money by making hotel and villa bookings for a travel agency, and I gave English lessons which were suddenly in demand, for a couple of hours a day. The exchange rate had improved in the pound’s favour, while the cost of living remained the same, so that our income was almost half as much again, though a cool watch was still kept on expenditure.
Tom Maschler wrote a long letter in which he outlined what he thought ought to be done about making Saturday Night and Sunday Morning into a successful book, to which I could only reply: ‘I may be able to let you have the manuscript by the date you mention.’ In a letter of 4th June Rosica said: ‘What Tom wants is the old mss of “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” so that he can compare that with the revised one, but you have not left that with me.’ Exactly. The reason was that in a letter of 6th May Maschler had written: ‘I confirm that you will let me have the completed manuscript by the end of July at the very latest, and I can then make suggestions on the rewriting as a whole.’
While completing the final version of the book I lived as if the England which I loved but did not especially like had little to offer. A miasma of falsity was spread by those who assumed that their opinions were the same as everyone else’s — and therefore the only ones that mattered — such hypocrisy stifling every aspect of life. These purveyors of conformism did not know about the great majority of the people, and did not care to consider them as worthy of notice. When they did not fear or hate them, they wanted them to be in perpetual thrall to values which the complacent upper few per cent had decided, because they were their own, were the only ones worth living by. This included those socialists and left-wing commentators who also thought they knew how people ought to live, but would never live like it themselves. The country was dead from the neck up, and the body was buried in sand, waiting for someone to illuminate those views and values which they were being told in a thousand ways were something to be ashamed of and ought never to be expressed.
Tom Maschler came to Majorca on holiday, and called on me in Soller to talk about what he had seen of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. I listened, but was unable to show any enthusiasm, wanting a publisher to say ‘Hats off!’ about my novel, or not touch it at all. Maschler may have looked on the book as something worth influencing, but if so it was difficult for me to feel in any way flattered by such interest. I had not been working unrewarded for eight years, and learning to write the hard way, to be told by any editor how to revise my novel.
My recent visit to England, and the reading of that score of books on criminology the year before, led me to believe that my writing should unite the opinions and observations, settled in my mind up to the age of eighteen, to those of the voice which had emerged during the past few years, and which exile had clarified. I knew by now that you do not write what society or editors expect, but only that which is illuminated by the truth of your own experience. A certain amount of iron must have been in my soul before I was born, reinforcing the attitude that the writer must listen to no one but himself, as a magnet attracts iron filings because it is a piece of more solid metal. He has to know, of course, what his true self is to be sure he is not mistaking it for someone else’s or for what other people say it ought to be.
A writer may well feel the need of approval from those around him, but he has a choice of courting the acceptance of those who run the country — at the time I was calling them ‘the rats’ — or of those who are the governed. The only valid way is to disregard both, to write for yourself alone, out of an ineradicable respect for the unique voice, but a voice all the same about which you must have no illusions. I had lived too many lives to listen willingly to others, and if my writing continued even now to be unpublishable, then so be it.
Having been lifted by Fate out of the zone of popular culture for most of the ’50s could be compared to a situation in which you didn’t have to listen to an adversary’s point of view, nor care about not being able to, since whatever it was could have no relationship to your own. In the age of mass media, cultural variations, called fashion, come and go, but the eternal values override them and remain, and it is the same today as it was then.
When Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was finished at the end of July I gave it to dark-haired and willowy Felicity Meshoulam, who was in Majorca on her honeymoon, to carry to England. This method saved on the postage, would be more secure than in the mail (though I had not yet lost anything) and might possibly bring me luck.
In August I set out, with the Dutch journalist Constant Wallach, to climb the 1,400 metres of Puig Major. After an all-night bout of mixed drinking we were hardly in condition for such exercise and, coming out of the wooded area of small oaks and stunted pines on to the stony slopes above the valley, the heat became intense. By midday we were at 1,000 metres, and in early afternoon had reached a point not far short of the summit. We hadn’t a hat or any water between us, and I at least should have known better but, as occasionally happens, Fate takes a stronger hand than common sense, something only realized when it is too late.