Until now I had submitted the typescript to those publishers who published the sort of books I liked to read. This was particularly so of Hodder, who published John Buchan and A. E. W. Mason and Eric Ambler and ‘Sapper’ and Philip Oppenheim and Dornford Yates, etc., etc. It cannot be said honestly that I liked Ward, Lock books. They were a grade lower down the scale, and, looking them over in a bookshop once, I thought, ‘Surely my book is better than some of these!’ What I didn’t know at the time was that Ward, Lock had started off many famous writers and then, through editorial inadequacy or failure of their publicity department or the meanness of their directors, had allowed them to slip away to more fashionable publishers who proceeded to cash in.
Ward, Lock kept the book seven months, then accepted it. I remember it was the 10th of May and I was in bed with a filthy sore throat. Within two hours of receiving the letter the sore throat had disappeared. I showed the letter to my mother, who looked pleased and startled and ultimately delighted.
The letter from Ward, Lock just said they were sorry for such a long delay but after due consideration they had decided to publish my novel ‘on a 10% basis’, provided I would agree to toning down one or two scenes in the book, which they said was so exciting that they felt it was not necessary to ‘out-Herod Herod in the details’. The letter was signed S. E. Sarcoe. It goes without saying that I agreed to the small amendments. This was the only editing of the typescript that they ever suggested; otherwise it came out exactly as it was put in.
Incidentally, the contract, when it came for me to sign, was only a page and a half in length, and, apart from the fact that it offered me no advance on account of royalties and no increase on the 10% of the published price with increased sales, it was a model of simplicity and generosity. All rights, except for a few small ones, were expressly reserved to the author. No modern publisher would offer such an unworldly contract.
When the news got around in the village it was a sensation. A few still wouldn’t quite believe it until they saw the published book – and one relative was frankly doubting that it would ever come out at all. But most people thought my fortune was made. Our local dentist – an educated Londoner – made calculations of the sales the book must have if merely every branch of Boots’ Library took one. (He was clearly ignorant that the practice of Boots’ Library – like that of most libraries – was to buy a couple of dozen copies and send them around where there was a request for them; so you put your name down and waited until one came free.) It was a bad time for new novelists – I have never known it not – but perhaps it was specially bad with Hitler beginning his long tramp to menace the peace of the world.
The book, The House with the Stained-Glass Windows, was accepted in May and published in October. In between I went up to London and met my new publishers in their substantial building in Salisbury Square, EC4. Ward, Lock was an old-established firm, well known for publishing cook books – including Mrs Beeton – and a vast selection of excellent guides. These were the bread and butter. Fiction was a sideline but a substantial one. They also published the Windsor Magazine which, after the Strand, was the most important monthly magazine of the day. I met my correspondent, Mr S. E. Sarcoe, who was the editor-in-chief, a cheerful, fast-talking, fastmoving, middle-aged man, whose lips seemed to get in the way of his words, a down-to-earth, no-nonsense, friendly man who knew a very great deal about commercial publishing but whose literary tastes didn’t exactly reach the stratosphere. He was delighted to know I had ‘almost finished’ a second novel (a heart-warming reaction for me) but he startled me by saying that they wanted two novels a year from me. There was ‘not much money’ in writing, but what there was could chiefly be earned by regular and constant output. They would like the second book by November, ready for next April, and preferably one the following May.
After that I met Wilfred Lock, the chairman of the company and virtually the dictator. He was a strange small man who was never away from the office and had his eye on everything. He had a very disconcerting habit when you met him of falling completely silent and then, when you volunteered something, immediately interrupting with a remark of his own. I have never met anyone else with this strange off-putting gift. Was it deliberate, I wondered sometimes? How else could he always have something ready to say within two seconds of your beginning to speak?
He greeted me with agreeable detachment and was pleased to learn that for the moment I did not have to depend on my earnings for every crust. Financially speaking, he said more than once, he always looked on novel-writing as a stick to walk with but never a crutch.
Naturally, from the moment that Ward, Lock decided to publish me, my view of their output drastically changed, and I found out all sorts of new virtues in their list. I felt myself lucky to be taken up by such a substantial and old-established firm. And, by God, I was! They were London-based, had a fair number of reps (commercial travellers in those days), a high standard of book production, an office in Melbourne and agents in all the ‘Colonial’ territories. When my book was published it came out with handsome advertisements in the heavy Sunday papers and the best dailies, and it received a fair amount of notice from reviewers.
Even now I’m not sure if I appreciate how extraordinarily fortunate I was – for I now regard this first novel as amateurish, derivative (how could it be anything else?) and sloppily written. The one thing it did have, I suppose, was immense story-telling drive, and if you could believe the story it would grip you to the last page. Had I been a publisher I would certainly have rejected it.
The reviews on the whole were kind, perhaps too kind. Robert Lynd in the News Chronicle headed his solus review ‘Wicked Uncle’ and was mildly amusing at my expense; Torquemada in the Observernoticed it, the Mail and the Telegraph had nice things to say. The review I appreciated most was a thoughtful one in a newspaper called the Buxton Advertiser. I wonder if it still exists? It criticized all the things it should have criticized but managed to convey appreciation at the same time. Its last sentence read: ‘Nevertheless keep an eye on young Mr Graham, for he has come to stay.’
The reviewer, bless him whoever he was, could hardly have known how truly he was speaking.
The reception locally was flattering. I became known as the local author, and was generally made more of than I had been before. I remember at a bridge drive – a horror I then attended to oblige my mother – a Mr Arthur Mitchell, an elderly retired London chemist who had some pretensions to being the squire of the village, said to me that he had enjoyed my novel, and then, with a half attempt to take a rise out of me, asked, ‘When is your next one going to be published?’ It gave me exquisite pleasure to tell him and to see his surprise.
Because I had stockpiled by having two novels finished before the first was published, I was able to have a third ready for the following September; but thereafter I fell rapidly behind Ward, Lock’s urgings to produce two books a year. I am not by nature a fast writer, and, although flattered by their requests, I instinctively rejected the idea of becoming a writing machine. In those days I was far less ambitious than I later became. What I really wanted above all was to improve, to learn, to expand, to make each book better than the last, and I thought one whole novel a year was the absolute maximum.
Also I was reading a lot of dangerous books on the technique of writing: Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction, John Steeksma’s The Writing Way, Basil Hogarth’s The Technique of Novel Writing, and The Technique of the Novel by Carl Grabo. These were fascinating but they did me a lot of harm. They grafted self-consciousness on the story-telling stem, and, although they did not throttle it, they doubled the labour without adding much to the quality of the finished product. My fifth book, The Dangerous Pawn, was my first attempt at a straight novel. When Wilfred Lock read it he said it was ten years ahead of any of the previous books but ‘ commercially I could shake you’. How right he was. I was told that Hatchard’s had been taking a dozen of my books and occasionally reordering, but when they heard The D
angerous Pawn was not a thriller, they would not even look at it.
Not that any of these books had been a commercial success. They had not produced anything like enough for even a single person to live on. (Looking at the figures I am about to quote, I feel as if I am, financially, writing not of the Thirties but of the Middle Ages.) My mother had a more or less guaranteed income from her partnership in Mawdsleys of £360 a year. On this she was able to live in a degree of comfort, with a living-in maid, a small car, and to take at least one holiday at a hotel a year. My first novel earned me £29, my second £33, my third £41, my fourth £35. Occasionally a little extra trickled in from somewhere, but my earnings never exceeded £60 a year. A distinct depression began to settle on me. In the early books on writing I had read, people spoke of the poor returns that might be expected of a first or second novel; they had not alerted me to the fact that a third, a fourth and a fifth might earn no more, or even less. There was no build-up at all. A year’s hard work produced £50. To be able to live off my earnings I would have to write six novels a year. Some people did, I knew, using different names. During the Second World War a youngish middleaged novelist called Maisie Grieg came to live in Perranporth with her husband. She was pregnant for the first time, and this was an area reasonably free from bombs. She also wrote under the name of Jennifer Ames and some other pseudonyms. Her son was born in the July. At the Christmas I went to see her, and someone said, ‘How many novels have you written this year, Maisie?’ ‘Only five,’ she said, ‘but then I did have Robert.’
That sort of production was beyond me – fortunately, as it turned out. But all through this period Ward, Lock never seemed to hesitate for a moment about publishing each novel as it was finished. And they made no attempt to edit, to suggest, to criticize. Except for the request that I should tone down a few scenes in the first novel, everything was printed exactly as I submitted it to them – to the last comma. It was a very considerable act of faith on their part, and some years later when people told me I had outgrown their list I stayed on with them, feeling they deserved more profit from the association. Perhaps this treatment from my first publisher has bred in me an egotistical belief that when I have finished a book – about which I have never consulted anyone, except my wife – then what I have written is what I wanted to write, and it is said in the way I wanted to say it. Full stop.
After I married, my wife was the one confidante, willing to listen, to talk. Often she was just the listener, so that, in talking it over, I could work out my own problem; sometimes she contributed a vital thought. When writing the Poldarks I often went to her for information about country ways, and she drew on memories of her Cornish farmer cousins. Sometimes she seemed to have a sort of folk memory – of things she knew by instinct rather than experience.
Only twice have I had substantial advice from any other outside source, and both with books rewritten from earlier published novels. On Woman in the Mirror (formerly The Giant’s Chair) Carol Brandt’s advice was invaluable, and on Cameo (formerly My Turn Next) Marjory Chapman’s equally so.
But if these were years of frustration, there were also years of development, and there were many compensations, not least that of living in Cornwall. Could one choose a better place to be a relative failure? Perranporth has one of the finest beaches in the world – I call it Hendrawna in the Poldark novels, Hendrawna being the name of a small area of the hinterland adjacent to that beach.
It was visited frequently by Tennyson, accompanied by his friend Henry Sewell Stokes, in the 1850s, and five years after Tennyson’s death in 1892 a poem was published in the Echo, for the first time, I believe, and attributed to him. I don’t think it has been included in any collected edition of his poems, but Henry Sewell Stokes should have known.
Hast thou ever in a travel
Through the Cornish lands,
Heard the great Atlantic roaring
On the firm, wide tawny flooring
Of the Perran sands?
Sea-rent gully where the billows
Come in great unrest;
Fugitives all white and reeking,
Flying from the vengeful Sea-king,
Striking from the west.
Level broadway, ever ermined
By the ocean verge;
Girt by sandhill, swelling, shoaling,
Down to imitate the rolling
Of the lordly surge.
Nine large files of troubled water
Turbulently come;
From the bosom of his mother,
Each one leaping on his brother,
Scatters lusty foam.
In the sky a wondrous silence,
Cloud-surf, mute and weird;
In the distance, still uplifting,
Ghostly fountains vanish, drifting,
Like a Druid’s beard.
Spreading out a cloth of silver,
Moan the broken waves;
Sheet of phosphorescent foaming,
Sweeping up to break the gloaming
Stillness of the caves.
I lived within a mile of this beach, and was free to walk on it whenever the fancy took me, or along the cliffs which rose up between Perranporth and St Agnes. This is Cornwall at its gauntest, at its most iron-bound. For centuries these granite cliffs have withstood mountains of water flung at them by tempestuous seas – literally millions of tons of seawater hurled at them in every gale – and they have lost none of their grandeur, scarcely anything of their shape or form through measurable centuries. The land bordering the cliffs is the habitat of rabbit and gull and errant seabird, mice and stoat and all small things – preying on each other but not yet preyed upon by man. It is rampant with heather and tiny flowers and wind-driven gorse, nothing much being allowed by the gales to grow above three feet in height; uncultivable, empty, wild.
Or should I tire of the sea, there were valleys to walk in – and every valley with a hasty stream. Marlowe’s ‘By shallow rivers to whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals’ does not apply to the Cornish streams. Birds, yes, in plenty, but the streams are always in a hurry as if they remember their heyday as vital adjuncts for the nearest mine – to provide water for the washing floors and the tin stamps and vital fresh water for the pumping engines which would corrode quickly if the acid minerals in the water they pump up were to be used.
I have no fear of heights when heights are presented by flying in planes, or standing at the top of the Empire State Building or the Eiffel Tower and looking down. But I have a morbid fear of climbing, which I have expressed in scenes in several of my novels: Night without Stars and The Loving Cup, for example. This stems almost certainly from an early occasion in Cornwall. I used to climb all over the great cliffs, without much thought to the risk, and usually on my own, and one day I decided to explore Sobey’s Ladder, which is a narrow mineshaft not far from Wheal Prudence – driven from part way down the black cliffs to the sea below. (Sobey was a miner who used to keep a boat on a ledge down there and use it for fishing.) When I was part way down I slipped and fell about six feet. There I clung on, with jagged rocks licked by the sea a hundred feet below. Slightly concussed, bruised and cut on shoulder and leg, nothing worse, I crawled slowly back to the top, lay there on the sloping grass gasping, and in the confusion of my swimming head it felt as if the grassy floor I had reached was slowly tilting until I was in danger of sliding off over the edge into the sea. There was no one within a mile, and the sun had just set.
I don’t remember how long it took to get home, but it was the end of cliff-climbing for me. For years after I had a nightmare of picking my way along a narrow path with cliffs looming above me and the sea licking below, and the pathway gradually narrowing until it petered out.
In the Poldark novels Sobey’s Ladder has been attributed to a man called Kellow.
Chapter Four
After the publication of my third novel, on one of my visits to London I met a man called Brian Hall. He was a junior partner in the firm of Gordon Harbord,
a successful theatrical agency. At a party at their offices where I was excited to meet a number of British actors of the day (does anyone ever remember Isobel Elsom?), Brian Hall told me he was shortly going to Paris, and invited me to go with him. After an anxious counting of my shekels, I agreed. We travelled overnight from Southampton to Le Havre and stayed at a pleasant enough small hotel. Brian had told me that he would be pretty busy every day so I would have to fend for myself. This suited me.
I thought of this first visit a couple of years ago when I was talking to an elderly doctor at the Savile Club, and he told me of his own first visit to Paris many years before, when he was twenty-one.
‘It was my first time abroad, y’know. The first time on my own. So, as I had heard so much about the Paris brothels, their luxury, their charm, I decided to try one. So I made enquiries and then went along to a house and rang the bell. I don’t mind telling you I was a bit het up. Well, the door opened and Madame stood on the threshold. She smiled at me and welcomed me in. Ever been to a Paris brothel, Graham? Well, it was quite impressive, I tell you. Big room she showed me into – crimson velvet curtains, gold chairs, etc. But standing in this room were a row of girls, various shapes and sizes, in different states of undress. They stood there and looked at me and I looked at them. In a row, like chorus girls about to go on stage. Some not bad-looking either. But a few of ’ em were so oddly rigged out that I thought they looked rather silly. They appealed to my sense of humour, d’you know. I smiled and stifled a laugh. They smiled back and one or two tittered in response. Maybe I was a bit strung up but I began to laugh more openly. There was more tittering from the girls, and then in no time we were all laughing together!
‘ Madame touched my hand. She said: “ Monsieur, I think I have something more suitable for you.”
‘ So she took my arm and guided me out of this room and down a passage and opened a door at the other end and gently let me through. It was pretty dark and it took a minute or so to see where I was. D’you know where I was? D’you know where she’d shown me? As the door shut behind me I saw I was standing in the backyard among the dustbins!’