This article by Tom Sharpe was published in the Daily Telegraph on 9 September 1995.
The once-prolific Tom Sharpe has taken 11 years to produce his new novel, which comes out next week. The delay, he explains, has nothing to do with writer’s block — more with an obscure allergy to the publishing world that he contracted in the mid-Eighties.
I am often asked why it is that, having written 11 comic novels at the rate of almost one a year during the Seventies, I “dried up” during the Eighties or, as the more perceptive inquirers put it, “You suffered from writer’s block.”
Being a pacific sort of person and anxious to maintain my reputation as a genial old buffer, I usually smile and lie through my teeth, grimly hiding my true feelings, and talk about ill-health, moving house, the presence in the new house of three teenage daughters, one bull terrier, a varying number of cats, a saintly wife and, of course, the various camp followers who had designs upon the said daughters. These, I imply, make it difficult for genial old buffers to concentrate on the great literary works we all aim to write.
In fact, my silence has had nothing to do with daughters, dogs, lustful young men etc. Strangely enough, it hasn’t had anything to do with “writer’s block” which, as I understand it, means that one sits before a blank sheet of paper and can’t think of anything to put down on it. I have never suffered from such a condition. If anything I suffer from logorrhoea, not a pleasant condition and one that involves the inability to stop writing.
On the other hand, it is true that my new book, Grantchester Grind, a Porterhouse sequel, is my first in 11 years and that, it seems, needs explaining. I can’t see why but it evidently does. After all, most people don’t publish anything in their entire lives. All the same, I didn’t have writer’s block. I had something I call Conglomerate Publishing Allergy, a curious phenomenon that I believe is more prevalent among members of the cottage industry of writers than is generally known.
The chief symptom is that one doesn’t have any idea who one is writing for. When I wrote Riotous Assembly and joined Martin Secker and Warburg it was a small and distinguished publishing house and I think I knew everyone working there. But in the great takeover wars that heralded the rise of the conglomerates such intimate publishers were made redundant. Size became all important and anonymity prevailed.
I think I contracted the allergy in Majorca 1985 when I misguidedly accepted an invitation to attend a sales conference organised by my latest in a line of conglomerate publishers. In those far-off days, I naturally assumed that sales conferences in Majorca were occasions at which the big chiefs, the middle management and the blokes at the cutting edge of publishing — that is, the sales representatives who earn a difficult living hawking books by Sharpe from one scarred and cynical bookseller to another — got together and disported themselves in the sunshine for a few days and took their minds off books by wining and dining and splashing about in the Med. Little did I know.
Of course I realised that there were bound to be snags: having Sharpe around the place tends to cast a miasma of gloom over the merriest of shindigs, and there were bound to be one or two other miserable scribblers eager to talk earnestly about post-modernism and the influence of Leavis or Bradbury or even Matthew Arnold upon their oeuvres. Even then I was aware that authors are the bane of publishers’ lives.
What hadn’t crossed my little mind was that a sales conference has all the hallmarks of premature purgatory, punitive flagellation and systematic sermonising by the dourest preachers belonging to some exceedingly austere Scottish sect. Emerson, thou shouldst have been living at that hour, thou wouldst have cheered the proceedings up.
The first inkling I had of the horrors to come dawned when we piled off the plane and were bussed to the hotel. Around me grim-faced men and sad women sat looking at the dusty landscape and modern apartment blocks that make Palma such an attraction for holiday-makers. They knew what awaited us. Presumably they had been forced to attend these penitential retreats before. But I still had hopes.
Leo Cooper was there and, hard as I looked, I couldn’t spot anyone who seemed faintly like a meaningful, significant member of the literati. So far so good. Even the top brass were vaguely self-deprecating and modest in their bearing. Only the timetable, a list of mini-conferences and discussion groups, boded ill.
The whole thing was too well organised and precisely timed. And there didn’t seem to be any spare time for lounging about the swimming pool or finding some small tapas bar in which to discuss Gissing’s effect on Wyndham Lewis. Or whether Martin Amis had been influenced by Barbara Cartland. No such luck.
At 0900 hours the next morning we were marched into conference rooms to contemplate the glories of dump-bins and to be motivated for the battle to sell. All morning I sat bemused by the enthusiasm with which books became commodities. Sales figures assumed a new significance. Graphs proliferated and statistics replaced words. An awful solemnity prevailed. But lunch loomed and with lunch there would be a lull in the war game. Like hell.
We debouched into the hotel dining room and suddenly there was a surge in Sharpe’s popularity. Leo Cooper’s rose even higher. We each had a separate table and, more to the point, we were permitted to drink wine. Thirsty men gathered round us to hear the words of literary wisdom we had to impart, along with the wine.
Nowhere else was there a sign of such good cheer. At long tables, at the head of which sat stern-faced senior management figures, the unfortunates sat down and looked gloomily at bottles of mineral water. Alcohol verboten. There wasn’t a sign which read “Water Tastes Better” but there might just as well have been. After lunch the indoctrination continued.
After two days, our little coterie of sufferers gathered in the hotel theatre for a final battle practice. The enthusiast in charge stood in front of a projector screen and demanded our attention. With a cunning I acquired as Third-Class Marine Sharpe, No PoX 127052, I skived off to the projection room to change the slides as and when ordered. What slides? Book covers, all of which, according to the official enthusiast, were destined to become best-sellers.
Until I stood in the relative privacy of that projection room and changed those slides and heard that marketeer speak with such eloquence, I had no idea there were so many best-sellers on the stocks. Not at Martin Secker & Warburg Limited at any rate. I mean, when my first book was accepted I remember some kindly soul remarking that Fred Warburg must be financially desperate. But now, according to the marketeer, the wind had changed and Secker & W was awash with best-sellers.
I was amazed. But my amazement had only just begun. His peroration climaxed, if perorations can be said to climax, with a rhapsody on “Tom Sharpe’s Porterhouse Black”. It was, he declared, my best book, the very best I had ever written and would sell like hot cakes.
Any author hearing such a eulogy is bound to be affected deeply. I was. As the cheering died down, I staggered from that projection room, a sheepish, shambling figure reeking of modesty. Around me, hard-headed salesmen and lynx-eyed saleswomen, all of whom had been through the dry hell of that ghastly conference, gathered eagerly. An author whose latest novel has been declared to be his best to date is almost certain to break out the champagne and order Beluga caviare in buckets.
The spell did not last long. One of my oldest and closest sales supporters approached me diffidently. “Tell me,” he said, tugging gently at my sleeve. “Is Porterhouse Black really as good as he says?”
I looked into his honest face and shook my woeful head.
“How the hell would I know?” I said. “I haven’t written the bloody thing yet.”
I haven’t to this day. For 10 years I have been haunted by the look of disappointment on that honest fellow’s face. And by the insight I had gained into the marketing of books. I saw myself for the first time as I really was, a minute cog in a vast machine called Conglomerate Publishing. Martin Secker & Warburg Limited had been subsumed — no, it had been consumed, swallowed and digested — by a series of vast conglomerates with about as much interest in books and writing, never mind literature and the existence of authors, as a boa constrictor has in the family life of the late rabbit it is digesting. At that moment I saw myself as that late rabbit.
Not that I blame the people who run conglomerate publishing houses for regarding authors as a necessary evil. I certainly don’t blame them for not reading books. They don’t have the time. Their days and nights are spent reading balance sheets filled with figures which have to gladden the bank balances of shareholders.
It was with a melancholy determination that I steered my friend towards the bar. We both needed a drink.
But that was 10 years ago. Conglomerate Publishing Allergy has finally left me and Grantchester Grind is the result. I put this down to two things: I have found an excellent family hotel in Spain where, not speaking a word of Spanish, I spend winters in almost total isolation; and the fact that I actually know and like Max Eilenberg, who runs the Secker & Warburg imprint in Michelin House. He is an editor who genuinely loves books. Even mine. It makes a difference. And my old editor, John Blackwell, is still there.
As the great P. G. Wodehouse wrote to me on December 31, 1975: “I am within two chapters of the end of my Jeeves novel, and have been brought to a halt by this Barrie & Jenkins business. I don’t know if it has been drawn to your attention but the blighters want to sell out, and my friend Christopher MacLehose, their fiction man, has severed his connection with the firm. It was simply to oblige him that I sweated blood to get my novel finished by February, so as to have it published by Christmas 1974, and now I don’t seem to care. As far as I am concerned he was the whole firm.”
And no one knew more about the business of writing than Wodehouse.
Tom Sharpe’s novel Grantchester Grind is published by Secker and Warburg on Sept 18.
Illustration caption: “My publishers had been swallowed by conglomerates with as much interest in books as a boa constrictor has in the family life of the rabbit it is digesting.”