other British SF writers. None of them wrote well enough, to my mind, except J. G. Ballard, another ‘discovery’ of Carnell’s.
A firmly entrenched belief in the book trade is that collections of short stories do not sell. On average, they sell less well than novels, and novels on average sell poorly enough. Publishing is a hard trade. But Space, Time and Nathaniel is still in print, thirty years on, having lived through four different English imprints. American publishers could not stand the silly title, and eventually issued an emasculated version under a generic – and therefore flavourless – title, No Time Like Tomorrow. Exactly the sort of thing that makes one hate being an SF writer. Spanish, German and French editions also appeared, the French Denoël edition being translated by Michel Deutsch, my first and possibly happiest French translator.
What was there in that volume which moved Kenneth Young, reviewing the collection in The Daily Telegraph, to claim that the stories conveyed ‘a true sense of wonder such as we find in Blake or Wordsworth’? The answer must be that their author was delighted with the majesty of the world, the possibilities in science fiction and the freedom of imagination which writing brought him.
5
Elegy for Minor Poets
The choice of publisher looms as a large decision in every writer’s life. As with many other things, advice is not much use.
If you have friends in publishing, the choice is made for you. You go to them, hoping the friendship will hold up. For most people, however, it is more a matter of sauve qui peut. You go to whoever is mad enough to accept your manuscript.
Not all publishers are alike, though all bear family resemblances. Authors can join the Society of Authors, which lives at 84 Drayton Gardens, in London, and the Society will advise. I am a member of the Council of the Society of Authors and an active member of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain.
Although publishers are necessary, it is as well to remember that what you write is more important than which publisher publishes it – and what you write is fully within your own powers of decision. It’s useless to be a writer unless you enjoy the freedom and responsibility to decide.
How long has it taken you to read this far? Let me tell you how long it has taken to write this far. It is now the twenty-seventh of September, 1985, at four thirty of a golden afternoon. The chair, the table, the typewriter, I – all outside my study on the lawn. I am thinking of breaking off for a mug of tea, a little conversation and a walk round the garden. Then an hour or two more work. I have to go to a play-reading this evening.
I have worked on this typescript all afternoon. This morning I answered letters. I am also working on two or three other books.
There’s a novel called ‘Whitehall’, which is tentative and may never get itself finished. Whitehall was the name of my grandfather’s house. There is the massive revision of my history of science fiction, Trillion Year Spree, which I am undertaking with the assistance of David Wingrove. And there is, or may be at any moment, depending on how the cards fall, ‘The Helliconia Encyclopaedia’, which has hovered over David and me, appearing and disappearing like the grin of the Cheshire cat, for two or three years.
This is a day of pure, still autumn, with butterflies exploring cactus dahlias and nasturtiums, creative weather. After a difficult year, when I have struggled to get near a typewriter, creative juices flow again. I began writing part of this narrative yesterday, at nine o’clock, moved by the beauty of the evening. I saw the whole book clear: something which might help aspiring writers and perhaps amuse all my comrades-in-arms, the great reviewed.
The family went to bed as I tapped away. I sat in a pool of electric light in my study while moonlight poured in through the window. Jackson, one of our dearest cats, arrived and scratched at the window to be let in. He has taught me a few simple gestures like that. When he was in, Jackson settled down on a chair. But I climbed out of the window and walked in the garden. All was silent. A full moon loomed over the pines in a stagy way, recalling Böcklin’s The Isle of the Dead. A quick rejoice and then back to the typewriter.
It is easy to become a writer. Easy, that is, compared with remaining a writer. To remain a writer you have to continue to write. If you take a year off, it is hard to get back in the flow. Better, and ultimately more enjoyable, to fall into the habit of writing every day. If you have to go on a train journey, talk to the others in the carriage; make notes of what you see, of what they say. If you feel like it.
Too early success in writing may quench a desire to write more. So may too early failure. So for that matter may a lot of other things. Many things can go wrong in the happiest of careers, and little charity is extended to those who fall by the wayside.
Louis MacNeice’s ‘Elegy for Minor Poets’ celebrates those for whom writing did not bring success:
Who were lost in many ways, through comfort, lack of knowledge,
Or between women’s breasts, who thought too little, too much,
Who were the world’s best talkers, in tone and rhythm
Superb, yet as writers lacked a sense of touch,
So either gave up or just went on and on –
Let us salute them now their chance is gone.
Long-sustained creativity over a number of years involves two overlapping parts of the personality, the intellect and the emotions.
The intellect seeks to make sense, or at least a pattern, out of the universe with which it is confronted. We may consider that in the ordinary person this seeking holds no great urgency, except perhaps in adolescence; it may be satisfied by a religion or an ideology of some kind, which lends a framework to daily life. Even the weekly football pool may make a kind of pattern to life; behind it lies a wish, not only to win money, but to control – on however small a scale – future events.
The search for a pattern may be painfully intensified in those whose upbringing, for whatever reason, was disturbed. In its extreme form, this disturbance may lead to a paranoid personality, who sees his or her world in terms of a conspiracy against him (it is usually a him). Painful this may be, but at least the intellect has its pattern. Something is satisfied.
Writers, so it seems, live somewhere between these two extremes. They feel the need to search, to seek for a pattern. Their books may represent separate, almost unrelated attempts to find this pattern; each book is a transient pattern in itself. Other writers, perhaps the more important ones, seek more comprehensive orders; their writings will be all related. Critics then speak confidently of such a writer’s development. Our leading writers, Graham Greene, Iris Murdoch and Doris Lessing, are accorded such attention.
This is not to say that such authors verge on paranoia, although Graham Greene has declared that he would have become a criminal if he had not turned writer. It is to say that, in this respect, they are not ordinary people; and their profession slowly separates them from the ordinariness they once possessed. (Of course, in every other respect they may be perfectly ordinary, shop in Marks & Spencer, weed the garden, travel on the Northern Line.)
‘The human mind seems to be so constructed that the discovery, or perception, of order or unity in the external world is mirrored, transferred, and experienced as if it were a discovery of a new order and balance in the inner world of the psyche.’ So says Anthony Storr, who has written more clearly about creativity than anyone. The quotation comes from his book, The School of Genius.
