Most of us drift through life on the vague if misguided assumption that most people like us well enough for most of the time. To be suddenly confronted with such raw hatred, and to be blamed for ruining someone else’s life, was a disconcerting business, and for a couple of days I felt shaken and depressed by this blast from the past. And then, quite suddenly, contrition gave way to anger, and I wrote him a furious letter in return. He had written, I told him, a very good book, but I now felt I had done him a great disservice by rescuing it from the slush pile, for although the reading public would have been the poorer without it, the price had been too high. I reminded him of how I had begged him not to give up his job, and told him that, sorry as I was to hear about his wife, he had only himself to blame. I recalled the time and attention I had happily devoted to editing his book, and told him how, without my enthusiasm, William Boyd and the others might never have reviewed it. I couldn’t remember the contractual terms, but was ready to plead guilty, bearing in mind that, with the costings as tight as they were, we may well have had no alternative. And if he and the Nottinghamshire librarian felt so strongly about the pyjama bottoms, then maybe he should have removed them from the text itself.
A few days later I received a placatory, apologetic letter from my old author. I wrote a friendly letter in return, wished him the best of luck, and have never heard from him since. His book, for all its faults, had been one of those rare oddities that brighten the publisher’s life, making a welcome change from the slick, often rather conventional offerings of sophisticated London literary types, and it seemed terrible that its publication, so exciting at the time, and so well-meant, should have brought such misery in its wake. A writer’s books are like his children, to be loved and worried over like their flesh-and-blood equivalents, and my author’s anxiety and irritiation were understandable if, to my mind, misplaced: but one of the perks of a writer’s life is the ability to talk to family, friends and complete strangers in absentia and from beyond the grave, and he can draw comfort from the fact that his book will still be available, in the copyright libraries at least, long after his tribulations have been entirely forgotten.
Ghostwriting is a lucrative business nowadays, as publishers compete to publish the maunderings of illiterate celebrities, self-important politicians and sportsmen with nothing to say for themselves. Very often the resulting books sell in derisory quantities, and the enormous advances have to be written off. But that is neither here nor there to the ghostwriters, who have already received a sizeable slice of the advance, and – provided they do their work well, and deliver on time and at the right length – can be fairly sure that more pop singers, celebrity chefs, footballers and television personalities are waiting eagerly in line to spill the non-existent beans. Yet until fairly recently ghostwriters were badly paid and poorly regarded, seedy and faintly disreputable denizens of the literary underworld who got drunk by day and toiled all night in a garret.
I’ve never been tempted to become a ghost, partly because I suspect it could very easily take over one’s life, and partly because – for good or for bad – I have too distinctive a tone of voice, which I would find it almost impossible to repress. Sometimes, as an editor, I rewrote and reworked a book to such an extent that I almost crossed the line between heavy editing and ghostwriting. I’ve written elsewhere how, thirty years ago, I helped Tam Dalyell write his prescient but disregarded diatribe against Scottish devolution, in which he spelt out the constitutional anomalies embodied in the West Lothian question, named after his own constituency, and forecast that devolution would introduce yet another layer of bureaucracy and would lead, in due course, to Scottish independence. Because time was so short – Cape, his publisher, wanted to get it out in time for that year’s Labour Party Conference – I ended up writing about half the book, pounding away on an old manual typewriter in an empty attic room in his ancestral home near Edinburgh while Tam strode up and down behind me, pontificating as he went and tearing articles out of newspapers and magazines. But I regarded myself as, essentially, his editor, and would never claim to have ghostwritten his book. Some years later Tam wrote to say that he had been brooding on the matter, and had decided that, like the nail in the horse’s shoe, I had single-handedly held the United Kingdom together, since without his book Jim Callaghan might well have pressed ahead with devolution. Alas, he had reckoned without Tony Blair, never the man to ponder the consequences of ill-thought-out actions.
I have ghostwritten one book, however, and that was towards the end of my time at Chatto. I first came across its author when my colleague Rupert Lancaster commissioned him to write an account of his celebrated cricketing career. Rupert was bug-ridden or out of the office when the typescript arrived, and it was agreed that someone else should take a first look at it, and come up with reactions and suggestions. The obvious man for the job was my colleague John Charlton, who had played cricket for Winchester and for his college at Cambridge, and had once bowled out Alan Ross with a slow lob which, much to Alan’s irritation, had somehow dive-bombed his wicket from a great height, rather like a kamikaze pilot. For some reason John was unable to take the job on, and it was passed to me instead – most unsuitably, since I know nothing about cricket and have no idea how a longstop differs from a silly mid-on. I read our author’s book, and although I was sure it would be of interest to his admirers, I felt it was too functional for its own good, and lacked the human touch. ‘I went in to bat,’ he would write of some important match. ‘I scored 200 runs. I was bowled out. I walked back to the pavilion,’ and so on and on.
‘This is very interesting stuff,’ I told him as we sat together in my tiny office in Bedford Square, ‘but I think it would be even better if you put more of yourself into the story. How did you feel, for example, when you were first chosen to play for your county, or when you scored your first century?’
‘Feel? What do you mean “feel”?’ he wondered, a puzzled frown wrinkling his handsome brow.
‘Well,’ I asked, ‘were you nervous, or elated, or immensely excited? What did it feel like when you went out to bat in a Test match for the first time?’
‘It felt all right,’ he replied, and that was the end of the matter. Luckily Rupert returned to the office a few days later, and I was able to pass the whole thing back to him.
But that was not the end of my involvement with the great man. Shortly afterwards he was commissioned to write a book about his native land. It was to be a large-format, heavily illustrated book, with colour photographs specially taken by a well-known practitioner, and our author providing a text of some 20,000 words, taking us on a journey from one end of the country to the other, and interlacing topography and history with snatches of autobiography. A handsome advance was agreed with his agent. A great deal of money would be tied up in production costs and monies paid to the author and the photographer, and because the book was expected to make a sizeable contribution to turnover in the season in which it was due to appear, much emphasis was laid on getting the typescript and the photographs delivered bang on time.
Once again, for some reason Rupert was out of the office at the critical moment. At one of our editorial meetings Carmen Callil pointed out that our man was due to deliver his book any moment – the photographs had long since been taken – and that since I was the only person other than Rupert who had had any dealings with the great cricketer, she told me to find out at once what was going on. I rang him at home, and we agreed that I should pay him a visit the following day.
Next morning, instead of