In such a season we turned back, and reached the valley in a state close to sunstroke. The summit of the island defeated me as surely as had Gunong Jerai in Malaya nine years before. The heights of both mountains were roughly the same, equally tempting and visible, but I ought to have realized that, small as they were, such pimples of the earth were not meant to be climbed by me. Other heights, though less solid under foot, deserved more attention.
I had always seen myself as a physical being, when I clearly was not to that extent, but the indication that such heights were beyond me was proved wrong when, on a tour across the United States in 1985, I set out alone at five o’clock one morning, to go down into the Grand Canyon. Three hours later I had crossed the Colorado River 5,000 feet below and nine miles from my starting point. To get back to the hotel before nightfall, and avoid the rattlesnakes, meant ascending a mountain in reverse, higher than any I had attempted to climb before, and I got back with nothing worse than sore feet and aching thighs.
I wrote a story during that last summer in Majorca called ‘On Saturday Afternoon’, about a boy watching a man trying to hang himself, suggested by a scene from the French film of Dostoevsky’s ‘The Eternal Husband’. Another tale from that year was ‘The Insider’, describing the collapse of the offices of a leading London literary magazine, and the death of the editor who is buried under the rubble. This was published by Michael Horovitz in New Departures five years later.
Poems came back from The Listener, Time and Tide, the London Magazine, and Partisan Review — to name a few, but Howard Sergeant printed ‘Guide to the Tiflis Railway’ in Outposts, to coincide with the publication of the booklet Without Beer or Bread.
A letter from Rosica at the end of August said that Saturday Night and Sunday Morning had been rejected by Tom Maschler at MacGibbon and Kee, but that she was sending it immediately to another firm. I had earlier told her that I had taken note of some of Maschler’s oral suggestions during his Soller visit, but this was little more than a white lie, to prevent her becoming discouraged in trying to get my work published.
Before the end of the year two more publishers were to reject the novel. I said in a letter to Rosica in December that I thought it would be a success if someone were to take it on, adding that in my opinion it was being rejected because it didn’t fit into the preconceived romantic notions that people had about the so-called working class. The book was too realistic, and didn’t support their theories, ‘but I have broken new ground,’ I went on, ‘and can only hope that some publisher will see this sooner or later.’
It’s no use saying I was not discouraged. One publisher thought, or so I was to hear, that I should alter the ending, though I would not have enquired in what way. Another gave it as his opinion that I did not know much about working people if I chose to describe their lives in such a way, which made it difficult to believe that a rather nasty form of what has come to be known as ‘political correctness’ was not being followed, or that some publishers’ readers were half conscious Marxist sympathizers who could not take to my book. I had always suspected that such leftward-inclining people looked on socialism as little more than a confidence trick to keep the Arthur Seatons of the world in their place. However it was, these rejections confirmed my eternal antipathy to anyone who tries to meddle in the work of a novelist. Such people are no doubt amiable, hard-working, and perhaps creative (with other people’s work) and eager to give that help which some writers timorously seek and are grateful for.
Publishers, and you may say why not, want novels which they think have a chance of selling, and are reluctant to print work without an editor having smoothed it into the style and content of what they imagine their readers expect, or what they decide, according to their own prejudices, readers ought to get, in which case there is little chance of a deviation from the dull norm, or of any interesting whiff of experimentation, or even of any flaws which can make an author’s work memorable. What one editor will think acceptable another will deem inept, so that only the writer’s version can be the right one. A writer should not surrender to the sail-trimming of editorial readers who want to guide him or her towards middle-brow best-sellers or, as in these days, the kind of book they think likely to win a literary prize.
Art only ever came out of a single creative mind, and good writing that aspires to art can only be achieved through trial and error. If it were not the case that the writer always knows best nothing interesting in fiction would ever be published. Writing is an activity where the individual is supreme, and an author has no chance of achieving anything unless his talent is protected by his own integrity.
The occupation of a novelist is a lonely one: labouring like the coalminer far underground, and away from all populist influences, or intellectual preconceptions, he has only the light from his helmet to illuminate the unique ore he has discovered, at which he must work undisturbed.
Chapter Thirty-five
I revised The General’s Dilemma, shortened the title to The General, and sent it to Rosica, being the version which was to be published, with few alterations, in 1960.
We had become friendly with the painters Philip Martin and Helen Marshal, who with their two children had come to live in Soller. How it came about I shall never know, because I had certainly not imagined leaving Majorca in the way we did. Perhaps we had been there too long, and acted out of a false sense of boredom with the place. Maybe Fate again had a hand in my life, but the fact was that we and the Martins assumed it would be jolly good fun, or something like that, to take off for Alicante on the mainland, share a flat, and set up life in a communal sort of way. An adventure of this type was so uncharacteristic of me that I still cannot decide how it happened.
Philip, tall and thin, and with a long black beard, looked something like a walking ikon. He stammered now and again to the point of incoherence, but had a fine sense of humour. Helen was about twenty years older, short and stout and loquacious, and wore shapeless smocks and skirts to the ground. The two of them together appeared, to say the least, ‘bohemian’, telling anyone from a distance that they were ‘artists’, though they assumed such flamboyance because that was how they wanted to be, and thought that the world could go and fuck itself if it saw anything unusual or funny about it.
Ruth and I were fairly indistinguishable from the normal run of people, so it’s possible that the Martins seemed by contrast more outlandish when we were all together than when they were on their own. They were also taken by various types of Indian mysticism at that time, reading such people as Krishnamurti and Shri Aurobindo, which didn’t interest me at all.
Our party assembled early in the morning at the Soller railway station and, as well as Philip and Helen, there was Philip’s mother, the widow of a Suffolk bank manager who no doubt felt the same sense of unbelonging as I did. She had come down for a week or so to be with her son and the two children, Steven and Serafina.
We stood beside a mountain of suitcases, steamer trunks, rolls of canvas, huge boxes of painters’ materials, bundles, easels, baskets and bedrolls, as if a tribe of gypsies was on the move. My little reconditioned Remington typewriter in its hard black case was somewhere in the middle.