From mammals I moved on, at about the age of twelve, to Classical Composers: these were listed, plus dates, on sheets of blue Basildon Bond notepaper, and arranged in alphabetical order. The Composers never gripped me quite as much as Mammals of the World, partly because I had other distractions: we were preparing to emigrate to Canada at the time, and I spent a lot of time reading and dreaming about the Canadian Pacific Railway which, in a few weeks’ time, would be taking us to our new home on the prairies. But when we came back from Canada some six months later I resumed my list-making activities – with, once again, a musical theme. Although I was far too buttoned-up to tap my foot or snap my fingers in time to the music, I became a passionate devotee of traditional jazz, and an expert on the subject.
By now we were in the mid-1950s, and like most trad. jazz addicts of the time I took an austere and restrictive approach to the matter. Our gods were King Oliver, the early Louis Armstrong, Bunk Johnson, Jelly Roll Morton and Kid Ory; we took a dim view of saxophones, Sidney Bechet excluded, and listened to nothing later than Fats Waller and the early Duke Ellington. I read every book I could find on the subject, and collected records of varying speeds: in a fit of fashion-induced madness, I pushed out the middle of my 45s to make them look more like jukebox records, so making it impossible to play them ever again. I persuaded the jazz-loving father of my oldest friend, Tom Pomeroy, to take us to Humphrey Lyttelton’s club at 100 Oxford Street; for a short time Penguin Books sold DIY kits with which one could convert one’s paperbacks into home-bound hardbacks, and with trembling hands I subjected my Pelican of Rex Harris’s Jazz to the treatment, pasting in some illustrations at the same time. And, of course, I went on making lists, some of which I still find tucked into my copies of Rudi Blesh’s All That Jazz and Mezz Mezzrow’s autobiography: interminable names of long-forgotten cornet players and drummers and clarinettists, written in fountain pen in a careful copperplate hand on the same blue sheets of Basildon Bond.
But my list-making days were almost over. At about the same time as I became a jazz addict, I decided, for no good reason, to support Leyton Orient Football Club. I had never been to Leyton in my life, and the East End in those days was thought of as a dangerous terra incognita; I had no interest in football and little understanding of the rules, even though I ended my school days as a qualified referee, a man in a brown blazer travelling down from Wolverhampton to present me with a certificate and express the hope that one day he would see me in action at Wembley Stadium; and Leyton Orient had an undistinguished record, forever lurking at the bottom of the Third Division (South). I expect I decided to feign an interest in football to ingratiate myself with the hearties who ruled the roost in the most games-mad house in a games-mad school, and chose Leyton Orient because I liked the name, and the tigerish striped shirts worn by the players: either way, I dutifully snipped out the details of that week’s defeat from the sports pages of the Sunday Express and pasted them into a notebook, along with the rare reports of the matches themselves. But this was not, strictly speaking, list-making as we know it; more the decadent remnant of a fading childhood addiction.
My literary ambitions as a child were equally modest, and easily satisfied: so much so that when I read about writers who have scribbled incessantly since they could first hold a pen, and are never happy except when seated behind their desks, I know myself to be a fake, or the literary equivalent of a Sunday painter, a dabbler who would probably never write another word if suddenly endowed with a large private income. Like thousands of my contemporaries, I was adept at knocking out jocular imitations of Belloc’s Cautionary Verses; like thousands more, I edited miniature newspapers, made by folding sheets of blank white paper again and again until it became impossible to bend them any more, and then filling the inch-high pages with tiny writing and drawings of pin men in action, arranged in columnar form. When I was at prep school I wrote, but soon discontinued, a story about two Romans, named – unwittingly, and to my parents’ amusement – Testiculus and Constipides; I don’t remember writing a word at my public school, and it was only when I went to Trinity College, Dublin, in the early 1960s that I began, very tentatively, to write poems and articles for the college magazines, two of which I eventually edited.
A few years later I took to reading my handful of poems out loud in London pubs, once in tandem with Jon Stallworthy; but I knew myself to be a hopeless dilettante, and soon abandoned both writing and performing. Despite my propensity for embellishing the truth, I have never had any desire to write fiction. When, in due course, I found myself poring over Cyril Connolly’s abortive attempts to write novels and short stories, and noted how this most eloquent of autobiographical writers became wooden and self-conscious in the process, I recognised, once again, a kindred spirit. (Connolly longed to be a novelist like Evelyn Waugh, but The Rock Pool, his only completed novel, is wretchedly stiff and unconvincing.)
When I left university I thought, in some vague way, that I might become a writer, but it never occurred to me that the only way to do so was to put pen to paper. I liked the idea of being a writer, but my approach was entirely passive: I assumed that, rather like the truths of Christianity or the existence of God, all would be revealed if I waited long enough. I never gave a moment’s thought to becoming a lawyer or an accountant, or going into business of any kind: partly because I suspected, rightly, that I would be no good at such things, lacking as I did both team spirit and the competitive urge, and partly from an arrogant and unjustified sense that I was cut out for better things. Had I done so, and had I survived the course, I would now be looking forward to an easy retirement and a reasonable pension rather than worrying where and how I can earn the next penny. But if my life has been short on both incident and material rewards – writers’ lives are famously dull affairs, and for the most part badly paid – at least it has been a continuum: editing and writing for the magazines at university had given me a taste for Grub Street existence, and I have gone on doing much the same ever since. But forty years ago, when I started out on the literary life, I had no idea where I was going, or what I wanted to achieve.
Cyril Connolly was always fascinated by the ways in which writers scraped a living. Shortly after the end of the war he sent a questionnaire to various eminent authors asking them what jobs or means of earning money were most compatible with the literary life, and published their answers in Horizon. Connolly himself recommended a rich wife; a common ideal among his less worldly contributors was a job, preferably manual, which wasn’t too exhausting, left the mind free, and didn’t compete with the business of writing. Wood-turning and vegetable-growing were among those mentioned by his correspondents. None suggested a job in publishing, so confirming Connolly’s own belief that the enemy of promise was not so much the pram in the hall as work in what he termed ‘cultural diffusion’ – publishing, journalism, broadcasting, the British Council and other agreeable, convivial and literate activities which brought one into contact with writers and the literary world, and could all too easily become a substitute for writing itself.
Despite such warnings, publishing houses inevitably include among their staff an above-average number of would-be writers, part-time writers and writers manqués. Every now and then one of them moves to the other side of the desk, and becomes a full-time writer. Most of them, no doubt, had gone into publishing for reasons which Cyril Connolly would have found deeply suspect. For my part, I assumed that all publishers were rather like the late Colin Haycraft of Duckworth – bespectacled, articulate, immensely well-read characters with double firsts from Oxford and a good line in corduroy jackets and colourful bow-ties – and that the life of a publisher’s editor (for such I assumed I would be) consisted of a little light editing in the morning, an afternoon spent reading the typescript of some new masterpiece, and the early evening given over to dry sherry and waggish repartee with eminent authors.
I eventually landed a very junior job in the publicity department at Collins, and I soon realised how misconceived my notions had been. There were plenty of literate, well-read individuals working there as editors, Philip Ziegler and Richard Ollard among them, but the salesmen ruled the roost; and although the formidable boss, Billy Collins, was a product