Bury My Heart At W. H. Smith’s

BRIAN ALDISS

Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith’s

Although these pages necessarily

exclude the family

they are dedicated

to the family

and in particular

to

WENDY and MARK

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Apéritif: Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith’s

1 My First Editor

2 Three Pounds a Week

3 Vienna Steak, Heinz Salad Cream

4 Imaginary Diaries

5 Elegy for Minor Poets

6 Recuperation: a Brief Chapter

7 In the Big Spaceship

8 Following in SPB’s Footsteps

9 I Dream Therefore I Become

10 Helping Writers – and Otherwise

11 An Evening in London, a Weekend in Nottingham

12 White Hopes, Black Olives

13 Wandering Scholars

14 Critic in a Jacuzzi

15 Stubbs Soldiers On

16 Medan, Malacia, Ermalpa, Avernus

17 From Oxford to Italy

18 Charivari

Appendix: The Brood of Mary, by Nicholas Ruddick

Works Cited

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

Here’s a report on writing life and the book trade before computers and electronics took over the literary world; before the flowering of Twitter and microblogging.

Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith’s was first published in 1990. I had completed it in some haste, since I was due to work with Stanley Kubrick on a proposed film. The pressure was on to find a title. Standing at Paddington Station, I saw a revolving wire rack filled with paperbacks for sale. In the bottom bracket I found a grubby copy of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown’s Indian history of the American West. Almost instantly I said to myself, ‘Oh yes, of course. Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith’s! Yes, that would be fun.’

At the time, W. H. Smith’s did not like my title and failed to stock the book.

Well, so much for them. Re-reading the text after almost twenty-five years, I find myself charmed and amused by its unbounded enthusiasms. Also, surprised – revived, in fact! Ah, the people I knew. Ah, my meteoric rise into obscurity!

So here it is, still warm from the oven, a recipe book of a young writer’s life: serious, yes, but also jolly, and juicy with anecdotes and personalities. A rumbustious pleasure of a book, bursting with zeal, angst and hope.

Brian Aldiss

Oxford, 2012

Apéritif

Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith’s

The train was crossing India from west to east. It ran steadily over the wide Ganges plain, from Agra towards Jamalpur, the weight of the brilliant day bearing down upon its carriages. I stared out of the window, stared and stared, absorbed in the landscape.

Nothing was to be seen but the wastes of the plain and the sky above it. A tree, a thatched hut, stood here or there, as pallid as the earth itself. In that dry season, there was no sign of the river; it had dwindled like a shrivelled limb.

Peasants worked on the plain, sometimes near the tracks, sometimes distantly. Unlike the peasants of China, these were isolated one from another. The sun had burned them hollow. They toiled almost naked. Some stood upright, working with hoes, while others were bent double. They appeared motionless, like figures on a frieze.

And they laboured on the plain every day of their lives.

Monotony was their lot. How did a man’s thoughts run, out there on the baked mud? What would he have to tell at sunset?

‘I was up before dawn and took a handful of rice. Then I worked, as you know. It was hot. Nothing grows. Now I shall rest. It’s dark. I will sleep …’

That terrible monotony, as stern a ruler as the sun. Ever since infancy I had feared reincarnation when, at the age of three, I was convinced I had been a wizard burned at the stake in a previous incarnation; the agony of the fire often woke me, crying. What was there to prevent me from awakening next time as a peasant, bound to the Ganges?

To survive as an Indian peasant requires endurance born of centuries of fatalistic courage, passive acceptance, qualities scarce in the unsleeping West.

Those days on the train were ones in which my determination to be a writer developed. I wished to tell everyone about that alien way of life. I had my subject matter. What I did not realise was that I also had the stubborn temperament a writer requires.

A glance at the list of titles I have written since those Indian days shows a preoccupation with time. From Space, Time and Nathaniel, to Non-Stop, through Moment of Eclipse and Eighty-Minute Hour, to Seasons in Flight and Forgotten Life, the idea of passing time glides like a serpent through the words.

Of course it was never planned that way. It just happened, as much in life happens. Perhaps I have a problem with my time sense.

Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem.

LENINGRAD. I was one of six writers on an Arts Council tour of the Soviet Union. We had been to Moscow and flown over the Caucasus to Tbilisi. Now we were being taken to the Kirov ballet.

The home of the Kirov is a grandly restored eighteenth-century building. The company itself is magnificent.

That night, they were dancing Hamlet to a modern score.

The ballet stayed very close to Shakespeare’s original story. But even a faithful Hamlet becomes, without words, the story of two rather pleasant middle-aged people who marry and, on their honeymoon in Elsinore, are pestered by a young fellow in black. This adolescent, contrary to the usual rule of adolescence, loves his father, who has died, and spends all evening dancing in and out, mucking up the honeymoon.

Hamlet is not Hamlet without Shakespeare’s words. The best part of a writer exists on the printed page. Without his or her words, a writer spends his time dancing in and out, imprisoned in Elsinore.

BORNEO. If there are still white patches on the globe, then unsurveyed parts of the interior of Borneo must qualify as terra incognita. There, hiding from the depredations of the timber industry, lives a wandering tribe which regards itself as part of the jungle which encloses it.

This tribe has a religion which would interest Carl Jung. It believes that all men possess two souls, an ordinary everyday soul which deals with ordinary everyday life, and a second soul the tribe calls the Dream Wanderer. This Dream Wanderer is a free being, not under the command of the person it inhabits. Although it cannot manage everyday things, it is native in the lands beyond the prosaic.

Directly I heard of this tribe, I knew I was an honorary member. I also am inhabited by a Dream Wanderer. The Wanderer roams where it will; sometimes it leans over my shoulder when I am typing and communicates in its own fashion. If I am lucky.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name …

She was very attractive and we were getting on famously. By mutual consent we crept away from the party and found ourselves in a little warm courtyard. There we fell into intense talk, touching, and looking deep into each other’s eyes. The point came when I had to tell her I was a writer of novels.

‘Do you write under your own name?’ she asked.

1

My First Editor

Arundel Street is a short steep street leading down from the Strand to the Victoria Embankment and the Thames. If you drove down it in a car with bad brakes, you might end up in the river.

On this occasion, I was going down it on foot, slowly and cautiously. I was about to meet my first editor.

Just recently, I went down Arundel Street again, thirty years later. Much had changed. Dull concrete frontages loom where once there was fanciful brick and terracotta. Colour has gone. There are large corporations, who like concrete frontages, where once small companies clustered behind flettons.

In the fifties, there were basement windows through which a passer-by glimpsed various activities. I peered through protective railings on this momentous occasion to glimpse a tall figure in shirtsleeves who was talking and laughing.

I ascended four shallow steps, where a brass plate announced ‘Maclaren Books, Nova Publications’. I entered, and made my way down into the basement.

A long room had been made complex by an arrangement of desks, cupboards, boxes, piles of books and magazines, pinups on walls as if it were still wartime, and several men, sitting or bustling about.

I was a callow youth, yet not entirely callow and not entirely youthful. Over the previous Christmas, the Christmas of 1955, I had won the short story competition in the Observer, then the leading Sunday paper. The story was set in the year 2500 AD and entitled ‘Not For an Age’.

Now I met my first editor. His name was Ted Carnell, the great EJ, whose obituary I would write, many years later, for The Times.

Ted always dressed neatly and was courteous and pleasant. He lived in a neat little house in Plumstead and spoke with a genial Cockney accent.

He had already accepted two stories from me, ‘Criminal Record’ and ‘Outside’. He was about to take me out to lunch and solicit more stories from me.

Think of all those literary anecdotes about poets meeting Cyril Connolly or Robert Ross for the first time. I was meeting Ted Carnell.

Before we left for the restaurant, he put on his jacket and showed me a watercolour painting by the Irish artist Gerald Quinn. It depicted some enigmatic metal shapes lying on a beach under an orange sky. It was very accomplished. I liked it immediately.

‘Do you think it would be better with a human figure?’ Ted asked.

‘Worse.’

‘It’s marvellous. I was thinking of running a competition for the best story explaining what the pic is all about.’

Although the competition never materialised, Quinn’s painting appeared on the cover of New Worlds. It still looks good.

The restaurant turned out to be an ABC in High Holborn. We went downstairs, where Ted had a regular table and was on good terms with the waitress.

‘How are the bunions, Mary, dear?’ Ted asked.

‘Not so bad today, thanks, Ted, how’s yourself? I’m saving two bits of the plum pie for you. It’s very nice and going fast.’

I was disappointed. Did Sartre have similar exchanges with the waitresses on the Left Bank?

Over lunch, Ted expressed an admiration for my stories and confidence in my future career. He wanted more stories for both his magazines. Perhaps one day, he added, I would like to meet John Wyndham?

John Murray to Currer Bell: ‘Perhaps one day you’d care to meet Charles Dickens?’

How many times have I been up to London since then? Living only an hour’s train ride from London, I have never seriously contemplated moving to the capital. As a result, a little excitement remains whenever I get aboard a Paddington-bound train.

Of course I was sorry that Ted was not grander, more aspiring, and that his waitress had bunions. But there had been the sight of the Gerald Quinn.

This is what I was doing with myself at that time when I did not dare to call myself a writer.

I wrote in the evenings, when possible. For all of the day, I worked in an Oxford bookshop.

What I felt inwardly was that I was undergoing a sort of personal renaissance. Overloaded with books and prints, that shabby little bookshop seemed the richest in the world. Its dust was hallowed.

This is what it looked like to my innocent 1947 eye.

The name over the shop says Sanders & Co. It also says Salutation House; there was once an inn of that name on the site. The shop is situated in Oxford’s High Street, nearly opposite St Mary the Virgin Church. The shilling shelves are on the left as you enter.

Hang on. In the shilling shelves are many books, all at that magic price, some of them worth a deal more to the right buyer. When the shop closes, someone staggers out of the shop with a huge black shutter which locks over the front of the shelves. Me.

This was the first job I did at Sanders. At the interview with the old man, he asked, ‘When would you be prepared to start?’

‘Now?’ I asked.

‘Now,’ he said. I was set to tidying the shilling shelves. I remember one of the books I tidied, that first afternoon. It was Lalla Rookh by Tom Moore, a friend of Byron’s. Time was when no self-respecting home was without a copy of Lalla Rookh. Many editions came off the mills, some bound in Russian leather, padded with cotton wool.

Moore was a jolly man, ever prepared to sing for his supper, and he had a sharp, observant eye, as his diaries show. Sad to say, many copies of Lalla Rookh went out to Sanders’ shilling shelves during my time there. Every dog his day …

A rich but chastening environment for a budding author is a bookshop.

Sanders’ shop is a long narrow dark secretive overstocked gallimaufry of a bookshop, comparing unfavourably in roominess with the crew quarters of one of Nelson’s ships. Packed under its low beams is a profusion of ill-sorted stock. From folios to duodecimos, an impressive range of volumes presents itself or lurks in obscurity.

Nor are there only books here. Maps, prints, engravings, hang wherever there is space. These are Sanders’ specialities. The old maps – Speeds, Saxtons, Mordens – mainly of the English counties, mop up what light filters in from outside while remaining themselves beautiful, cryptic, and severe in their Hogarth frames. The elegance of those frames!

Halfway towards the rear of the shop is a door which gives on to a twisting stair which leads up to Mr Sanders’ office and, beyond that, the rare book room where few are allowed to go. On the staircase is a framed engraving of Dr Johnson short-sightedly reading a 32mo.

Mind your head as we get to the rear compartment of the shop downstairs. Here, besides rows of books small and gigantic, such as Mrs Jekyll’s Country Life books, we come to the stove, a desk, a gate cutting off the cellar, and the till.

The till is a wooden affair with a narrow slot in its top, through which one may write on a roll of paper

Ensor’s England … … 1. 1. 0.

The till opens with a ting, the paper drum rolls on, and the assistant deposits a guinea in the correct wooden partitions.

Above the till is a window which allows a ration of light into this section of the shop, although the ration is so feeble that electric lights burn all day. The window is partly obscured by an old hurdy-gurdy which hangs there. It is Italian, and has to be tucked under the chin like a violin and wound by a small handle. Occasionally, Sanders, a music-lover, will take it down and play a melody.

Oh, yes, a strong whiff of the nineteenth century still clings to Sanders’ shop. This is the first taste I have had of England since I was a child when, at seventeen, I was swallowed up into the British Army. I am intoxicated by the strangeness of everything. I half-read all the books, flitting from one to another, while at the same time dreaming my private dreams of sex and science fiction.

Beyond the hurdy-gurdy is a last section, filled in part by a small office and a packing booth. The books here, tucked at the rear of the shop, are of less tempting varieties. This is the resort of Classical textbooks, Agriculture and Logic. There is also a narrow space behind the Classics, very unpopular with assistants, in which some stationery is housed: the humdrum things that students need, particularly the students from Oriel College, next to the shop, such as loose-leaf books, refills for same, pencils, notebooks, and the like.

In the office sits Mrs Y. In the packing booth stands Mr Watts.

I bring in a book for despatch abroad.

‘That ’on’t go today,’ says Mr Watts.

Although this is not all Mr Watts says, it is possibly his most characteristic utterance. Watts is a kindly, crusty man, with teeth of fierce yellow and a tisicking cough, both cough and yellowness caught from the old pipe he constantly smokes. Uncomplainingly, he works all day with paper and string, making the odd excursion to the post office in St Aldate’s, or delivering a package to a college nearby. His movements as he works are leisurely and professional. He never wastes an inch of string.

After about four in the afternoon, when a sort of drowse overcomes the shop in general, as the lack of air gets to us all, and Mrs Y makes a pot of tea for us, Mr Watts views further candidates for posting with an increasingly jaundiced eye and larger clouds of smoke, and utters again his immortal phrase, ‘That ’on’t go today.’

Beyond Mr Watts’ cubbyhole is a door into the rear premises. The shelves here are rather makeshift, stuffed with books in wild disorder, books bought cheap and unloved. They lie now, idle and unemployed, volumes on brass and beadwork and brassica crops and ballet and the breaststroke and Bastien-Lepage and Brittany and Buckingham, to venture no further into the alphabet.

Even this is not the end of everything. There are rickety back stairs, where once the maids of the Salutation Inn carried up trays of porter to gentlemen dining privately in upper rooms. On the stairs, on every step, more books are piled, right up to the top. They are making their way upstairs. There is hope for them. Some will enjoy the privilege of being catalogued by that shy, charming, poetic man you probably meet just here. He is polite, amusing, and already a little bald. He is just the company a new assistant wants, and is recently down from Merton. His name is Roger Lancelyn Green.

Roger is no more. At that time, he had written a delicate fantasy or two, some poems, and a book on Andrew Lang. He was destined to become quite famous and to marry a pleasant Oxford lady. Later would come his involvement with Lewis Carroll. At present we will leave him cataloguing books on the stairs and peering into a first edition of Douglas Jerrold’s Mrs Caudle’s Curtain Lectures, which were at that time still sought after in Oxford.

If we turned left past Roger, we should enter the rare book store behind Mr Sanders’ office. Instead, we turn right where the stair twists, and find ourselves in Heaven.

This is the highest part of the ancient building, highest and untidiest. Its one dusty window looks out across the broken rooftops of Oxford.

In imitation of the real thing, Heaven is damp and leaky. Here, Dickensian charm and creative vandalism go hand-in-hand.

Many are the old books which find their way into Sanders’ clutches. Some are fashion or natural history books. Some are of a topographical nature, illustrated by steel engravings or etchings: views of English countryside, foreign views, views of Oxford colleges. Sometimes the bindings of such volumes may be torn. Sometimes the text may be considered dull. Then the book can be broken up and the illustrations or maps sold separately. And sold especially well when coloured and mounted. This applies with particular force to that beautiful octavo book in three volumes, Ingram’s Memorials of Oxford, many sets of which, entering the premises of Salutation House, find themselves broken up for the sake of the engravings of colleges within. Good complete sets must by now be extremely scarce.

The breaking, the mounting, the colouring, is done in Heaven. Here, at benches under a dusty window, sit Sheila and Miss Worms, working away with their watercolours. Mr Rudolph Ackermann’s Repository of the Arts, which produced many fine illustrated books last century, must have been just such a place as Heaven, housing folk who had fled from the Terror in France after the Revolution. We find an echo of that here in Heaven: the cheerful and teasing Miss Worms is in fact a refugee from Hitler’s Reich. As for Sheila, she is young and pert and pretty, and I once fancied myself in love with her.

So to the stock room behind Sanders’ office. Here are the scarcest books, the most precious, the most cherished. The stock room is subdivided. In a small locked room called Pickle rest those books deemed most scarce, most precious, most cherished, by the miserly Sanders. These regal favourites are drawn up in ranks, gaining in value … We mentioned Mr Ackermann; here stand no fewer than seventeen sets of Ackermann’s History of Oxford, in two volumes, full of lovely coloured plates of colleges. There are even a few sets of Ackermann’s Cambridge. Together with many other books, some mildly pornographic, which Sanders could not bear to sell.

In the stock room you may come across a set of Peacock’s novels in tree-calf, or a complete set of Thomas Hardy’s first editions, all bound uniform (but this is vandalism) in blue buckram, together with many other prizes. In huge wooden cases, specially made by Mr Watts, are stored Hogarth’s engravings of London life and Piranesi’s engravings of prisons and of Rome, in various states. There are also some Rowlandsons. Such Rowlandsons! Country scenes, bawdy scenes, inns, maidens, stage coaches, the whole eighteenth-century world which Thomas Rowlandson’s calligraphic line so skilfully evoked.

I had never heard of Rowlandson until I went into Mr Sanders’ stock room, and have worshipped the man’s work ever since. He was unrivalled as a draughtsman until Beardsley drew. In Mr Sanders’ house on the Woodstock Road hung perhaps ten lilting Rowlandsons, country landscapes of the greatest delicacy of line and colour. No doubt they are now in the Paul Mellon collection. Over Sanders’ mantelpiece hung a pristine print of the painting generally regarded as Rowlandson’s masterpiece, ‘Vauxhall Gardens’.

As far as Rowlandson is known, he is valued for his scenes of bawdy, of boisterousness and drinking bouts. But with that subject matter goes a style of transparent delicacy. His creamy young Georgian maids might have stepped out of Cranford or a novel by Thomas Hardy. A travelling print-seller used to come round and sell Sanders pornographic Rowlandsons for his gentlemen clients.

Without being judgmental, Thomas Rowlandson elegantly recorded an England at once awful and enviable. I owe my introduction to him to Frank Sanders – another amusing bounder.

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