Miracles of Life (19 page)

This is Tomorrow opened all the doors and windows onto
the street. The show leaned a little on Hollywood and
American science fiction; Hamilton had got hold of Robby
the Robot from the film
Forbidden Planet
. But for the first
time the visitor to the Whitechapel saw the response of
imaginations tuned to the visual culture of the street, to
advertising, road signs, films and popular magazines, to the
design of packaging and consumer goods, an entire universe
that we moved through in our everyday lives but which
rarely appeared in the approved fine art of the day.

Hamilton’s
Just what is it…?
depicted a world entirely
constructed from popular advertising, and was a convincing vision of the future that lay ahead – the muscleman husband
and his stripper wife in their suburban home, the consumer
goods, such as the tin of ham, regarded as ornaments in their
own right, the notion of the home as a prime selling point
and sales aid for the consumer society. We are what we sell
and buy.

In Paolozzi’s display, the power tool laid on the post-
nuclear sand was not just a portable device for drilling holes
but a symbolic object with almost magical properties. If the
future was to be built of anything, it would be from a set of
building blocks provided by consumerism. An advertisement
for a new cake mix contained the codes that defined a
mother’s relationship to her children, imitated all over our
planet.

This is Tomorrow convinced me that science fiction was
far closer to reality than the conventional realist novel of the
day, whether the angry young men with their grudges and
grouses, or novelists such as Anthony Powell and C.P. Snow.
Above all, science fiction had a huge vitality that had bled
away from the modernist novel. It was a visionary engine
that created a new future with every revolution, a hot rod
accelerating away from the reader, propelled by an exotic
literary fuel as rich and dangerous as anything that drove the
surrealists.

If pop art and surrealism were a huge encouragement, my
work at
Chemistry & Industry
kept me up to the mark about
the latest scientific discoveries. An established science magazine receives a steady flow of press releases, conference
reports, annual bulletins from leading research laboratories
around the world and publications put out by UN scientific
bodies and organisations such as Atoms for Peace. I feasted
on all this material, the accounts of new psychoactive drugs,
nuclear weapons research, the applications of the latest-
generation computers.

For several years I commuted to Belgrave Square, first
from Twickenham and then from Shepperton, a long
journey that left me too tired to write, except at weekends.
After being cooped up all day with the children, Mary
needed to breathe. I remember her saying when I reached
home at 7.30 and was pouring a stiff gin and tonic: ‘Are we
going out? I can call the babysitter.’ I thought: Out? I’ve been
out. But we would go down to one of the pubs on the riverbank,
and she would come alive when I bought a sandwich
and threw bread to the swans.

In 1960, sadly for himself and his family, the editor of
Chemistry & Industry
, Bill Dick, killed himself with a gas
poker and a plastic bag. He had been the once celebrated
editor of the science magazine
Discovery
, but had become an
argumentative alcoholic. After his death I was left alone to
produce the magazine, and adjusted my time so that I could
write in the office. My one piece of out-and-out commercial
fiction,
The Wind from Nowhere
, was written straight onto
the typewriter during a fortnight’s holiday in 1961, and was
published by an American paperback firm, Berkley Books. I received an advance of $1000, which seemed a fortune. I
celebrated by moving from the 3/6 (three shillings and
sixpence) lunch menu at the Swan pub in Knightsbridge to
the 4/6 menu, an extravagance that alarmed the waitresses,
to whom I had proudly shown a photograph of my three
children. It is easy to forget how thin was the line between
poverty and bare survival.

In 1963
The Drowned World
was successfully published,
and with Mary’s encouragement I gave up my job at
Chemistry & Industry
and became a full-time writer. Despite
the many editions of
The Drowned World
, this was a huge
gamble, and I’m grateful and impressed that Mary urged me
to take it. The novel was published all over the world, but the
amounts of money forthcoming were modest.

Victor Gollancz, the patriarch of English publishing, paid
me an advance of £100, barely enough to keep a family afloat
for a month. When Gollancz took me out to lunch at The Ivy
and I saw the prices on the menu I was tempted to say: I’ll
have nothing to eat, and just take the cash. But I knew that
being lunched by Gollancz was a significant honour. He had
dominated London publishing throughout the 1930s and
1940s, and had a huge influence on literary editors and
readers. As we sat down in The Ivy he boomed in his loud
voice: ‘Interesting novel,
The Drowned World
. Of course, you
stole it all from Conrad.’ The Ivy was a haunt of senior
journalists, and I saw heads turning. I thought: My God, this
grand old man is going to sink my career before it’s launched. As it happens, I had not read anything by Conrad
at the time, though I soon made up for this.

My first decade as a writer coincided with a period of
sustained change in England, as well as in the USA and
Europe. The mood of post-war depression had begun to lift,
and the death of Stalin eased international tensions, despite
the Soviet development of the H-bomb. Cheap jet travel
arrived with the Boeing 707, and the consumer society,
already well established in America, began to appear in
Britain. Change was in the air, affecting the nation’s psychology
for good or bad. Change was what I wrote about,
especially the hidden agendas for change that people were
already exposing. Invisible persuaders were manipulating
politics and the consumer market, affecting habits and
assumptions in ways that few people fully realised.

It seemed to me that psychological space, what I termed
‘inner space’, was where science fiction should be heading.
But I met tremendous opposition. The editors of the
American s-f magazines were nervous of their readers, and
would refuse to accept a story if it was set in the present day,
a sure sign that something subversive was going on. It was a
curious paradox that science fiction, devoted to change and
the new, was emotionally tied to the status quo and the old.

While I was at
Chemistry & Industry
I would regularly
meet my fellow writer Michael Moorcock, who later took over Carnell’s magazines when he retired. We had spirited
arguments at the Swan in Knightsbridge over the direction
science fiction should take. Moorcock was a highly intelligent
and warm-hearted man, who embraced change and
became a vocal spokesman for the New Wave, as the avant-garde
wing of science fiction was known. What I admired
most about Moorcock was that he was a complete professional,
and had been since the age of 16, writing whatever he
needed to write in order to make a living but always imposing
his own vision. Daniel Defoe would have approved of
him, and Dr Johnson. Moorcock was extremely well read –
in fact, I sometimes think that he has read everything – but
has kept his popular touch. He is writing for his readers, not
for himself. I once said to him that I wanted to write for the
sort of s-f magazine that was sold on news-stands, and
bought by passers-by along with a copy of
Vogue
and the
New Statesman
, all hot from the street. Moorcock completely
agreed.

Moving on the fringes of literary London for four
decades, I have been constantly struck by how few of our
literary writers are aware that their poor sales might be the
result of their modest concern for their readers. B.S.
Johnson, a thoroughly unpleasant figure who treated his
sweet wife abominably, was forever telephoning and buttonholing
me at literary parties, trying to enlist me in his
campaign to persuade publishers to pay a higher royalty
to their authors. At one point, when he was far gone in bitterness over his minuscule sales, he suggested we should
demand a starting royalty of 50 per cent. Sadly, he was one
of those literary writers who receive a glowing review in the
Times Literary Supplement
, believe every word of praise and
imagine that it will ensure them a prosperous career, when in
fact such a review is no more than the literary world’s
equivalent of ‘Darling, you were wonderful…’

I had many reservations about science fiction as a whole,
but the early 1960s were an exciting time. It was possible to
have a short story in every issue of a magazine, each one
exploring a new idea, a superb training ground. Too many
writers today have to start their careers by writing novels,
long before they are ready. I thought then, and still think,
that in many ways science fiction was the true literature of
the 20th century, with a vast influence on film, television,
advertising and consumer design. Science fiction is now the
only place where the future survives, just as television
costume dramas are the only place where the past survives.

Apart from my friendship with Moorcock and his wife
Hilary, I had few contacts with other writers. I went to the
world s-f convention held in London in 1957, but the
Americans were hard to take, and most of the British fans
were worse. In Paris science fiction was popular among
leading writers and film-makers like Robbe-Grillet and
Resnais, and I assumed that I would find their counterparts
in London, a huge error. Today’s s-f enthusiasts are an
entirely different breed, however. Many have university degrees, have read Joyce and Nabokov and seen
Alphaville
,
and can place science fiction within a larger literary context.
Yet curiously, science fiction itself is now in steep decline,
and there may well be a moral there.

The first English novelist I met and got to know closely
was Kingsley Amis. He had reviewed
The Drowned World
in
extremely generous terms in the
Observer
, and was the first
to introduce me to an audience beyond science fiction. He
was then at the peak of his
Lucky Jim
fame, a highly intelligent,
witty and glamorous figure who was pleasantly affable
to anyone whose writing he liked. He reviewed science
fiction in an open-minded way, maintaining that the best of
the genre deserved to be taken seriously in the same way as
jazz at its best.

After Victor Gollancz’s death Amis joined Jonathan Cape,
then the most fashionable publishing house in London, and
effectively took me with him. Cape published me for the
next twenty years, in some ways a mixed blessing. I knew
Amis closely from 1962 to 1966, and often had lunch with
him in Soho. He was a great drinking companion – the food
served at Manzi’s or Bertorelli’s was little more than an
appetiser for the real sustenance in the form of numerous
bottles of claret. He was a great raconteur and brilliant
mimic with a number of set-piece performances, such as
President Roosevelt’s wartime short-wave broadcasts, with
isolated phrases like ‘arsenal of democracy’ and ‘tanks, guns,
planes’ emerging from a blare of static.

Amis had just freed himself from his teaching post at
Cambridge, and was in very good humour, but sadly this
darkened over the next ten years as he grew dissatisfied with
everything. I think he knew that his first book had been his
best, and this led to heavier and heavier drinking, coupled
with a certain social stiffness. Where once he was happy to
drink beer in pubs, he now insisted on going to hotels, where
he would order pink gins in an over-elaborate way.

By the last years of his life his hates were in full flow –
Americans, Jews, the French and their entire culture, hippies
and, for some unfathomable reason, Brigid Brophy. In the
1970s we once looked down during lunch from a window of
the Café Royal at a protest march going along Regent Street.
Amis began to tremble and shake. ‘Jim, what are they? What
are
they?’ He was almost speechless as he surveyed the
column of cheerful young people with their anti-nuclear
banners. To be fair to Amis, he had been through the war,
and served in the army in northern Europe. While he had
never taken part in combat, he told me, he had seen plenty
of bodies by the roadside as the British forces advanced, and
felt that he knew far more about the realities of war and
peace than the soft-cheeked protesters in the street below us.

Amis disliked literary pretension (as he saw it) of any kind
and was a remarkably astute judge of fiction, which I can say
even though he later disliked a good part of my own writing.
He believed in the 19th-century virtues of well-drawn
characters, credible dialogue and a strong story. No novel should ever comment on itself, but sustain the illusion that
it is enacting real events.

I met his son Martin when he was 14 – like many of us, at
heart, unchanged by the decades – and in later years Kingsley
always seemed proud of Martin’s success. ‘Great stuff,’ he
would say about Martin’s latest novel, and I saw none of the
meanness or grudging praise now credited to him.

Undoubtedly, Amis did have his mean streak, and was one
of those people who feel a need to break with all their
friends. His treatment of women could be crude. One of his
former lovers, a student during his Swansea teaching days,
told me that he would regularly order his wife into the
nearby park when it was time for his ‘tutorial’ with her.
There the novelist’s wife would push the pram with the
children until he drew the bedroom curtains and signalled
that she could return.