Raban - For love & money: writing, reading, travelling, 1967-1987

T HIS IS PARTLY A COLLECTION , partly a case-history. Ive clocked up nearly twenty years as a professional writer, and in that time Ive made the intimate acquaintance of all of Cyril Connollys enemies of promise, with the sole exception of the pram in the hall. Ive written out of compulsion, for love, and Ive needed the money. It is a curious occupation, this business of short-distance commuting between the bedroom and the study, and a subject in its own right. It puzzles people. Strangers at parties, striking up a literary conversation, dont (usually) want to haggle over the contents of your review of Martin Amis in last weeks Observer, let alone whether your most recent book got off to a bad start in the first chapter. They have quite probably read neither, but theyre still interested. They want to know whether you use a pen or a typewriter, what time you get up in the morning, whether you keep regular working hours, whether you can really make a living from it and the big clincher exactly what and how you get paid. Average-adjusters, lecturers in economics, shoe salesmen, property developers, dont wince, shuffle and gaze distractedly at the ceiling when someone politely asks And what do you do? For the professional writer that question (which is quickly followed by Oh, should I know your name?) is the prelude to a searching catechism of a kind more appropriate to a VAT inspector than to a fellow-guest in a drawing-room. The safest response to it, if you can summon the requisite bottle, is to say Im a steeplejack and beam ferociously.

Alternatively, you might answer the catechism by hauling your surprised questioner off for a weekend to give them the works the hours, the commissions, the block, the aborted beginnings, the continuous themes that slip from fiction to non-fiction and back to fiction again, the double-spacing, the advances, expenses, public lending right, royalties, and the editorial advantages of using wide margins. Part of this book consists of blue-pencilled scenes from that weekend, because the questions are worth answering. Conditions on New Grub Street change with every generation. The world originally described by Gissing in the 1880s connects with, but is significantly different from, the world described by Cyril Connolly in the 1930s and 40s. Mine, in turn, is different from Connollys; and someone now in their twenties, setting out as a professional writer in the late 1980s, would encounter a working world much changed since I first knew it in 1969. This is a particular story, of someone born in 1942 who wanted to be a writer and found himself working in a very specific set of industrial and economic circumstances. How did he come to get the job, and what sort of a job is it?

I was eight or nine when I knew that I was in the merely occupational sense of the word a writer. It was a knowledge founded on no evidence at all of any special verbal or imaginative talent. Yet it was a fact, just like the fact that I was asthmatic. I was a writer. More precisely, I was an author. For writers, or so I supposed, actually did quite a bit of writing, moving fast from one piece of paper to the next. Authors were as immobile as waxworks. They sat at desks in photographs. The paraphernalia of their trade expensive fountain pens, gilt-edged blotting pads, silver inkwells, marbled notebooks were arranged in tasteful still-lives in front of them. They had the glossy hair and jutting chins of matine idols. They were oh, A. E. Coppard, Edgar Wallace, Michael Gilbert, Nevil Shute, H. E. Bates and I could feel the glow of their fame radiating out from their pictures to include me.

It was what I was going to be: a personage in a photograph by Karsh of Ottawa. It seemed a reasonable ambition, not because anyone had yet suspected that I could write, but because I enjoyed a secret intimacy with authors, all authors, that was conspicuously lacking from my relations with any other human beings. They might not know it yet, but I was one of them; and this perverse conviction was the tranquillising drug on which I dosed myself, several times a day, through ten years of childhood and adolescence.

Outside these daydreams of literary celebrity, I cut a fairly sorry figure. It was the old, too-often-written story of the delicate child, packed off at eleven to a school of daunting military and athletic traditions, where milksops were not suffered gladly. Fusewire-thin from several years of a wasting disease called coeliac, the boy wheezed when he moved, and sounded as if hed trapped a flight of herring gulls inside his chest: he was no asset as anyones friend. So (and this is how the story always goes) the child made friends with books instead.

Books admitted me to their world open-handedly, as people, for the most part, did not. The life I lived in books was one of ease and freedom, worldly wisdom, glitter, dash and style. I loved its intimacy, too the way in which I could expose to books all the private feelings that I had to shield from the frosty and contemptuous outside world. In books you could hope beyond hope, be heartbroken, love, pity, admire, even cry, all without shame.

No author ever despised me. They made me welcome in their books, never joked about my asthma and generally behaved as if I was the best company in the world. For this I worshipped them. I read and read and read under the bedclothes with an illegal torch, surreptitiously in lessons with an open book on my knees, through long cathedral sermons, prep, and on the muddy touchlines (Kill him, Owen!) of rugby pitches, to which I was drafted as a supporter. I did not then see any logical hiatus in the proposition that since I was happy only when I was with authors, I must therefore by definition be an author myself.

I had long ago discovered the trick of switching the world off like a light and entering fictions of my own. First, you had to let the room full of boys drift out of focus and wait for their voices to dissolve into a blur of white noise. Then Jim turned on his heel. The smoke from the cigarette in his ivory holder rose in slow coils.Lets go, he said, picking his way, agile as a mountain buck, through the huge boulders of the tinder-dry watercourse Jim was my heroic alter ego. His chronicles were never written, but they lay in my head as accessible and as palpable as memories. He began as the natural leader of a band of men called The Marines, whom he conducted round the world on adventures that were a distillation of all the best bits of Buchan, Edgar Wallace, W. W. Jacobs and Conan Doyle. Jim, who was sometimes called The Captain, smoked a lot, drank Green Chartreuse, solved crimes, found things for people, did a great deal of camping out, spent whole days fishing, and every so often led his men off to wars fought with pes and sabres.