Extract
Instruments of Death (US title: None But the
Damned), finally published in 1973 when I was 32 years
old, came out as a paperback original with a lurid cover showing
a German soldier hanging out of a blazing tank. There had,
indeed, been a few blazing tanks in the novel, but as my novel
was about English people, with German soldiers only viewed,
as it were, at a distance, I failed to see how the cover they
had chosen could possibly illustrate its contents. When I
complained about this, after receiving the flat cover, which
deeply shocked me, as did the new title, I received a lengthy
letter from my editor at Corgi, explaining that I was an unknown
author and distributors felt more comfortable with a product
that seemed like something they knew and were successful with.
Corgi was then running a hugely successful fictional series
about the Second World War as viewed from the German side,
written by Svens Hassel, so it was felt that if my first novel
was packaged and sold like one of his, with a cover and title
similar to those on his novels, it would stand more chance
in the market place. This may well have been true (and my
respect for my editor, Alan Earney, remains undiminished),
but the tawdry presentation and misrepresentation, which reduced
what was, at least, an ambitious, epic work to the level of
a cheap potboiler, killed off any chance that it might have
had to be received as a serious first novel.
In the event, it sold briskly enough, in the pre-CD ROM days
when a first printing for even an unknown paperback writer
was 40,000 copies (now reduced to 5,000 or 10,000), but it
made no great waves and received only two or three reviews,
which were, at least, positive. A few years later, a second
edition, with a desperately old-fashioned illustration of
Winston Churchill, complete with Homburg hat and umbrella,
standing in the ruins of the Blitz, was slipped into the market
with no fanfare and quickly faded from sight. An American
edition of the novel, also published as a paperback original
but with a much better cover and retitled None But The
Damned, was published by Pinnacle Books in 1974, sold
reasonably well, possibly received reviews, though they certainly
weren’t sent to me, then disappeared for all time. The
American cover included a quote from Robin Moore, the best-selling
author of The French Connection, who described
it as ‘The greatest war novel since Norman Mailer’s
'The Naked and the Dead’, but as that particular
quote seemed to appear on practically every World War II novel
published in that period, one can assume that this was simply
a case of the publisher pulling in an old favour. (I didn’t
personally know Robin Moore and was never to meet him.) My
beloved Instruments of Death then disappeared for
all time, only gaining me a foothold on the ladder that led
to literary oblivion: the paperback writer’s No Man’s
Land. Fifteen years down the drain.
This, however, was all in the distant future. In 1962, when
the heavy manuscript of that novel began what was to be about
ten years of submissions to disinterested London publishers,
I was serving as a medical clerk with the RAAF in a hospital
in Sydney, Australia, involved with the first real love of
my life, the brunette whom I had met on the Canberra en route
to Australia, and commencing work on what would turn out to
be the biggest mistake of my writing career, founded on ego
rather than instinct or common-sense. At that time I was strongly
under the influence of two apposite writers: the Objectivist
philosopher and novelist, Ayn Rand, and Norman Mailer, the
American author whose career, after a remarkable start with
The Naked and the Dead, had stalled and then been
refuelled with high-profile journalism in which he turned
himself into his own lead character, giving himself a variety
of names, advancing from, simply, ‘Mailer’ to
silliness like ‘Aquarius’. (Of A Fire On the
Moon.) These two writers were to influence me in all
the wrong ways.
Ayn Rand is the author of the hugely successful novels, The
Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which use fiction
as a platform for her so-called ‘Objectivist’
philosophy. Born in Russia during the Stalinist era, but escaping
to America when still a child, Rand was fervently against
communism and equally fervent in her support of American capitalism
and what she describes as enlightened self-interest, which
abhors altruism and reveres ruthless individuality. (One of
her philosophical essays is entitled ‘The Virtue
of Selfishness’, which pretty neatly sums up her
whole philosophy.) Nora Ephron has said that if you pick up
an Ayn Rand novel as an adolescent you won’t be able
to put it down, which is a good reason for not picking it
up in the first place. By this she possibly meant that Rand’s
work, rather like Scientology, offers a panacea to adolescent
insecurities by encouraging one to believe that doing only
what one personally wants to do, irrespective of the feelings
of others, will guarantee your self-esteem, ensure that you’re
not false to yourself, and benefit a society being poisoned
by altruism or, as she would have it, socialism or communism.
As an insecure adolescent, I wore this misbegotten philosophy
like armour and, though almost pathologically shy, used it
to present myself to the world as super-cool and in complete
control.
Norman Mailer, on the other hand, was a writer of prodigious,
if dramatically wayward, talents. One of his talents lay in
his ability to ruthlessly promote himself by any means possible
and at any cost to himself or to others. Charles Dickens was
probably the first writer to realise the enormous potential
of self-promotion and in its pursuit he travelled the world
to give dramatic readings of his work; nevertheless, he remained
true to himself as a human being and emphasised his work rather
than himself. Ernest Hemingway was probably the first writer
to recreate himself as an almost totally fictional character,
the writer as macho man, fighting wars, hunting wild animals,
working hard and playing hard, and he used that personage
to gain enormous media coverage for himself, which he did
successfully while losing his original, more truly artistic
self in the process. Mailer chose the Hemingway route. Simultaneously
awed by the older writer and deeply resenting his greater
fame, Mailer slavishly aped his ridiculous macho posturing,
then went completely overboard in ever more desperate attempts
to imprint himself upon the minds of the media by deliberating
courting notoriety by any means possible, no matter how distasteful
or unprincipled. His methods included wild parties, head-butting
games, other forms of drunken and stoned violence (including
the stabbing, by penknife, of one of his many wives), ruthlessly
personalised condemnations of fellow authors and old friends,
numerous TV appearances and public readings, during which
he was often drunk and abusive, a shameless latching on to
any fashionable or controversial trend or subject (Vietnam,
Black Power, Rock Music, Women’s Lib, et al), running
for Mayor of New York (on a ticket with Jimmy Breslin) and
even making atrocious movies in which he was the writer, director
and star, though hardly an actor. Of course, young people
loved him for all of this, mistaking his shameless exhibitionism
for honesty or courage and assuming, as I certainly did, that
real creative people had to behave that way.
There can be little doubt that Mailer was a real writer, starting
with his remarkable debut novel, The Naked and the Dead
and going on to such monumental non-fiction works as
The Executioner's Song; but while I appreciated his
work there is no doubt in my mind that his high public profile
was what initially fascinated me and blinded me to the sheer
awfulness of, say, Barbary Shore and An American
Dream, let alone his asinine, though often verbally dazzling,
metaphysical babbling about God and the Devil, Buggery, Shit,
and so on. (Indeed, why should I, an uneducated, working-class
lad, not have been fooled when learned critics on both sides
of the Atlantic, all educated at university and specialising
in literature, had fallen over themselves finding deep meaning
in such verbose trash? And I had, of course, read the reviews
and drank them up like mother’s milk.) Many years after
the initial publication of An American Dream, in
a scathing overview of Mailer’s whole career up to the
1990s, the British writer, Martin Amis, described the overblown
prose of An American Dream as the work of a writer
in ‘a trance of false creativity’, but no one
could have convinced me of that when the novel was first published
way back when I was still in my early twenties. My belief,
now, is that Amis was correct, but this belief was not there
to help me then. What influenced me most about Mailer, then,
in 1965, when I was 24 years old, and what coloured most of
my work over the next few years, was the way in which, for
good and for ill, he had placed himself stage-centre, using
himself as both hero and clown, in works such as Advertisements
for Myself and The Armies of the Night.
(Readers may feel justified in accusing me of doing my own
version of Advertisements for Myself with this work.
While I believe that this book and Mailer’s are very
different, the basic charge must remain. That this book is
a similar kind of self-advertisement cannot be denied, though
its intention is to serve a different, more modest purpose.
For a start, I am not trying to run for President: I am merely
hoping to show how the working, non-celebrity writer survives
- and even evolves artistically - without the help of the
media.)
Strongly influenced, therefore, by Ayn Rand’s pernicious
tomes about ruthless individuality (the self-serving individual,
ruled by his mind, impervious to mere emotion) as well as
Mr Mailer’s use of himself as a quasi-fictional character
in his own non-fiction works, I embarked on a semi-autobiographical
novel entitled Youth Without A Face. In this lengthy
tome the basic facts of my life were used openly (as distinct
from their disguised form in the first novel) and mixed with
a lot of philosophical, first-person musings about the angst
of youth and the corruptions of the adult world. The completed
work was, of course, an unpublishable mess, firstly because
I had moved from the third-person narrative to the first-person,
which severely restricted my imagination; secondly because
the use of facts instead of fiction brought out every adolescent
cliché imaginable, not to mention whole oceans of self-pity
mixed with Ayn Rand styled arrogance; and, thirdly, because
I simply didn’t have the talent or, indeed, the education
(Mailer’s talent and education) to deal with anything
other than the instinctive creation of believable characters
and stories - then and now my sole talent. Nevertheless, I
finished the epic tome, which was over 500 pages long, and,
while my first novel was still going the rounds and receiving
rejection slips, I sent out this second work only to find
that it, too, was being rejected, in this case (as I now recognise)
with sound reason. That book has not been published to this
day and nor should it be.
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