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Bookbound
Jeffrey Bernard
One of my favourite cartoons of all time was a John Glashan one which appeared in Private Eye some five years ago. The drawing was almost irrelevant and consisted (lune simply of two heads speaking to each Other. The caption ran: `I'm writing a novel.' Neither am I.' It was and is very near the knuckle. Too close for comfort as far as I'm concerned. Of the many things I !eel ashamed of, not having written a book IS pretty high up on the list. I'm talking, of course, of things like cash advances and not about something I think I owe in other respects or feel I ought to do. But it's not so easy. It's certainly a hundred times harder to write a book than the man in the pub Would have you believe. You must know He stands there pontificating over a Pint of bitter and he thinks he's seen it all. Good lord,' he tells you. 'I've got a story in Ine and if only I could put it down on paper, I reckon I'd make a fortune. Yes, if I had Your gift for words — that's to say, if only I could put it down on paper — then I think I could make a bloody fortune. As a matter of !act, I did once think quite seriously of going • Into journalism, but then I thought, well, it wouldn't be fair on the wife and kids.'
Worse than that gentleman is the genuinely bright customer, usually a woman, who just knows she could do it all ten times better than you. As often as not she's in love with the English language, over-embelishes every sentence, rolling witticisms around her wine-stained tongue and doesn't write because, 'Oh God, I don't really think I can be bothered.' In her case s just as well because she's so damned Clever she'd never be able to keep it simple enough to be readable. The message she'd write from a desert island would have to be Put into a Jeraboam. Well why isn't it easier to write a book?
In the first place it takes gall. I'm positive that the likes of Frederick Forsyth and Harold Robbins, the men who make real loot at the writing business, are absolutely convinced that they're great. It takes a load of arrogance. It's also hard work, something I'm not enamoured with — but more than anything else in my own case it's the subject matter that makes it almost impossible. I think, that at the moment, I owe three publishers three autobiographies. Now, for a start, it's a bit of an impertinence to write an autobiography. At least, I think it is. Secondly, I have hardly any recall for things past. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the whole business of an autobiography makes me wince with an embarrassment hard to come by in a personal bit of journalism that's only going to be eight hundred words long.
To start at the beginning, and I suppose one must, I find it impossible to believe that anyone at all is going to be interested in my particular miserable childhood and schooldays and yet the schoolday reminiscence has become something of a literary cliche. Other people's fascinate me, by my own tales of adolescent woe — so important to an autobiography — fill me with that cringing embarrassment.
Do you dare to show yourself as you really are and if you do just how much do you mind what people think? Come to that, if you're one of those people who say you don't give a damn what people think of you, then I'm not sure I entirely believe you. Unless you're Fredrick Forsyth, of course, or John Le Carr6 or Jacqueline Suzanne or Will Shakespeare or Bernard Levin and can therefore laugh all the way to the bank or any other place of entertainment. I suppose what 1 really envy is the ability to enjoy writing. To use yet another cliche, I find it a lonely dull business that takes place when others are conversing, gregarious, wining, dining, not having to think and just drifting.
Oh, I've got it in me all right. If only I could settle down to a set routine I could write a cracker of a book. I think what I might do is to take a cottage in the country and write a book there. Failing that, I think might get up at 6 am every morning and write until midday. If that doesn't work, then 1 think I might ask someone if 1 could have desk space in their office where there's an infectious atmosphere of hard graft or, possibly, I might move into a seaside hotel for a couple of weeks and finish the book there. Now, if I hadn't got any financial worries it would be dead simple. That's it.
I'll borrow a few hundred quid from someone and settle down alone to work for a month until I've finished it. No, I know.
I'll just pull myself together and get on with it. No I won't. Yes; I know what I'll do.
Starting tomorrow 1'11 go on the wagon and work office hours at home. Or if I just slip out for the odd glass of wine at lunchtime, I can come back at 3 pm and work until teatime. Failing that, I could try dictating into a tape recorder and get a girl to type it out for me. Yes, that's it. She might even be fabulous and you never know, she might even. . .
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