Basil Street Blues (14 page)

Age and particularly old age dominate it… these are not the tragic or coy old people created by novelists. They are comic but not laughable because they are so true to life. Like many old people they have lowered their sights and narrowed their field and live in grumbling contentment within their prescribed limits…

As I am usually over-sparing in praise, I could add that reading
A Dog’s Life
gave me the same kind of sensation of being in the presence of real talent as did the first production I ever saw of
Three Sisters
, listening to
Under Milk Wood
, and reading
Mrs Dalloway
for the first time.

Heinemann were to offer me an advance on royalties of £500 which was ten times what they had given me for
Lytton Strachey
. Roland Gant did not wish to publish
A Dog’s Life
until the two Strachey volumes were out of the way. But since Penguin Books wanted the novel as a paperback and my publisher in the United States also sent me a contract, I was happy.

But my father was not happy. He had given up writing novels by then and assumed that I had done so too. He had read an early draft of my novel guardedly, reassuring himself perhaps that it would never be published. When I posted him the later shortened typescript, his reaction was more sparing in its praise than Roland Gant’s. ‘The typescript of your book arrived,’ he wrote, ‘and I read two or three chapters before I was so nauseated that I had to put it down.’ Since the first two chapters covered five pages and the third chapter reached the top of page eight, this was not encouraging. Of course he had read more, though he could not bear to finish the book. But he wanted to impress on me as dramatically as possible how dreadful my novel was. When I urged him to complete it (it was not long), arguing that the death of Smith, the family dog, brought out the underlying sympathy of the characters (a sympathy sunk so deep, one reader was to write, that you needed a diver’s suit to reach it), he simply refused. He hated everything about it.

Your formula is evident. Take the weakest side of each character – the skeleton in every cupboard – and magnify them out of proportion so that they appear to become the whole and not part of the picture… Surely you could have written a study of old age and loneliness without photographing your own family for the background? Why should they be pilloried? You go out of your way to avoid any redeeming features in anyone’s character. One would have thought that you could have waited a few years until we were dead before appraising the world of our misery.

If I went ahead and tried to publish the novel, my father promised to bring legal proceedings against me and the publishers. Publication would, he believed, expose to savage ridicule the whole family, especially himself and Yolande.

As you know I work in a firm with a staff of several hundreds. Were you to publish the book I should have to give up my job. I am too old [aged sixty] to stand the sort of humiliation you wish to heap on our heads. I am also a little too old to get a new job and start again.

In the circumstances – for my sister’s sake and my own – I must do everything to prevent this book being published
anywhere
till we are dead, and I am prepared to take whatever steps that are necessary legal or otherwise.

I was appalled by this hostility – as appalled as he was by what he felt to be my hostility. The next four months, during which I tried to negotiate some compromise, were deeply unhappy for us both. When I asked my father what pages he would like changed, he answered rather wittily: ‘Why not introduce a few fictional characters? It would of course entail rewriting but you would discover whether you are a novelist or whether – as I believe – you are not.’ Here lay one of our difficulties in reaching an agreement. For where I would refer to
A Dog’s Life
as a novel, my father insisted on calling it a ‘distorted biography’; and where I pointed to inventions, he saw lies. But it was of course true that the first drafts of my characters were closely sketched from life. ‘Had you written down the name and address of the family you could hardly have done more to ensure that they were identified,’ my father stated. He did not allow that this problem might be solved by my using a pseudonym since he believed, probably correctly, that my identity would soon be uncovered. When I sent him Roland Gant’s report and an approving letter from another editor, he merely replied that they were ‘not on the receiving end’, and repeated that ‘the whole family are together in their dislike of this distorted picture you have drawn of them’.

But this was not really true. Adeline, my grandmother, knew nothing of this book and never would; while my mother, who was now living again in London, described it as ‘a hoot’ (though it was very far from the kind of novels she really liked, which were big American bestsellers featuring very rich people misbehaving in Cadillacs and swimming pools). Her acquiescence however did not impress my father. ‘Your mother may not object to anything you say about her under the misapprehension that – her surname being different – she will not be so easily identified… She is as usual generous at others’ expense.’

My mother was changing her surname so frequently that I doubted whether any pack of investigative critics could catch her. But I was shocked by the ferocity and unfairness of my father’s anger, not realising how many bruises I was pressing on. For example, I called the character based on myself after my Uncle Kenneth. I did not know my father’s earlier years had been lived under the shadow of his elder brother. ‘Could it be that he is the worldly & financial success you so admire & is therefore not to be offended?’ Such a question nonplussed me. For years my father had been accusing me of a lazy disregard for the financial ways of the world. The truth was that he envied Kenneth’s success and resented his inability to give me some of it.

Being obliged to reread
A Dog’s Life
for the first time in almost thirty years, I do not find it hard to understand my father’s dismay. As Henry Farquhar he appears ‘inclined to fatness, jovial in manner and vociferous in his denunciations’. He bulges out of his green suit, the colour of which clashes with his complexion (a patchwork of mauve and crimson), and by various means he spreads consternation and panic through the house. At one time he is innocently using up all the hot water for his bath (drowning the clamour of complaints at the bathroom door with his lusty singing); at another he is filling the dining-room with smoke, sparks and a snowstorm of tobacco as he attempts, between terrible volleys of coughing and a blind staggering from wall to wall, to light his pipe.

My father had a rather bullying manner of speech. What left him as no more than an intended hearty pat on the back would land as a telling slap on the other person’s face. It was a trick that opened him up to caricature. He would prefix his honest advice with phrases such as: ‘Don’t be an utter fool...’, and invite other people’s opinions by asking: ‘What pearl of wisdom are you about to let fall?’ His general conversation was peppered with recommendations to ‘Be your age!’ or ‘Take it from one who knows.’ He could not understand the reactions some of this well-meant banter produced. In my novel I tried to catch this tactless style of talk and set it in a more sympathetic context. ‘Even at his kindest, Henry somehow contrived to sound offensive. He was shy of his generosity, awkward in exposing his good nature,’ I wrote. ‘…For all his apparent robustness, Henry hated the sight of pain or illness, and was far more sensitive than he dared admit.’

Such passages had no effect on my father, if he ever read them. ‘I must admit a feeling of great distress when I read your true opinion of me,’ he wrote. ‘...I quite agree with your statement that I am a failure. I am well aware of it.’ In vain did I tell him that this character in my novel was not a failure in the way he meant – he actually brings off an important business merger on which he had set his sights. The ‘failure’ lies elsewhere: in the inability shown by each one of the family (including ‘Kenneth’) to break out of his or her separateness and (except at the moment of tragedy) touch the others. ‘After the long-awaited triumph of the merger that he [Henry] could share with no one, after the thrills of the drive that no one wanted to hear, a great weariness overcame him. He couldn’t continue this kind of life forever.’ Yet we continued. That, it seemed to me, was our predicament.

Heinemann gave me moral support over this difficult period, which is to say that they distanced themselves from the battle, frightened of a Pyrrhic victory. They could not afford, they warned me, to win a court case over a novel. The cost of injunctions, delays, extra storage etc. would be too great. It was therefore up to me to settle matters amicably. Since this proved impossible, production on the book was stopped and
A Dog’s Life
never appeared in Britain.

When I asked my father about publication abroad, he replied: ‘Of course I agree that were the book to be published in Hindustani or Erse there would be little likelihood of it affecting anyone, but this does NOT apply to the
English Language
.’ He relented a little, however, over the United States. ‘If you alter the story as far as Yolande is concerned this is all I ask of you,’ he conceded. ‘She, not I, must be the judge of this.’

I had given the character of my Aunt Yolande the name Mathilda after the dashing young heroine whose adventures she had read to me in the kitchen when I was a child. In the novel I raised her to over six feet tall, made her Henry’s aunt instead of his sister (and gave him a special moustache and a naval background). My American publisher then took the advice of a New York lawyer who declared the novel to be potentially libellous if the Holroyd family were indeed in the corned beef business in Canada (my equivalent of tea in India), if my father lived with his family and was ‘in celluloid’, if my mother was married to an industrial agriculturalist, and so on. In any case, the lawyer concluded, there would be no substantial risk of libel because ‘the Holroyd family simply isn’t that well-known in this country’.

I decided to go ahead and publish in the United States. I felt I had done what was reasonable to protect everyone, including myself, and no one should be hurt. I did not tell my father or my aunt. I alone was to be the judge.

A Dog’s Life
was published in the United States in 1969, reviewed surprisingly well considering how English it was and, less surprisingly, sold not so well. I was in New York at the time of publication, beginning research for my
Augustus John
. When I returned, bringing with me my advance on royalties due on publication of the novel, I found that my father was in great financial difficulties. Everything he had feared about the future of his business and had once hoped to escape through a new career writing novels, was coming true. So I handed him my advance – the best part of £2,000 – without him knowing that it came from the American publication of
A Dog’s Life
.

What then happened remains obscure to me. Some months afterwards I received a letter from the Official Receiver in Bankruptcy. It appeared that my father’s new company, Seamless Floors Ltd, was already in liquidation. ‘I note that you are named as a party in the debenture created by the company on 6 January 1970,’ the Receiver wrote to me. Evidently my father had been interviewed with his solicitor at the Board of Trade offices. Beyond the fact that this was bad news, I understood nothing. There were references in the letter to ‘the provisional liquidator’, a ‘floating charge’ and ‘Section 322 of the Companies Act 1948’. The letter ended: ‘Will you please consider the matter and let me know your views?’

It seemed to me that my views would be without value and were therefore useless. But I must have replied (I have a second letter stating that the contents of my reply ‘are noted’). The correspondence has long ago been destroyed by what is now called the Insolvency Service (which is part of the Department of Trade and Industry) and in any case I heard no more. My ‘investment’ had not been enough to save my father.

It must have been about five years later, when I gave him the American edition of
Augustus John
, that my father suddenly realised my novel had actually been published and also that I had handed him my royalties. There were many ironies in the situation. He appreciated, I think, my fine act of revenge. None of the family had been troubled by its publication, and it all seemed history now. But my father wanted to ‘balance the books’. He wanted to ‘pay me back’. He did so most ingeniously by means of some far-flung tea shares from a colony of the Rajmai empire that had somehow escaped the liquidation of Rajmai itself in the late nineteen-sixties. I still have these shares. Indeed I cannot get rid of them. Each year I am sent details of the severe local weather, the fresh damage to crops, the lower prices and higher production costs. Some years the directors (who until recently included a member of the Magor family, a new Richard Magor) are unable to recommend a dividend; other years when they do, they are nevertheless unable to pay shareholders abroad because of Foreign Exchange Regulations. I have become the apotheosis of Holroyd business enterprise. The rupee stops with me.

Looking back, it seems to me that my father probably had the better of our long rally (those tea shares were really his aces). But I am left with an unexpected feeling of gratitude to him. He saved me later embarrassment. Also the troubles I had over my novel-writing, though intensely depressing to me at the time, reinforced my desire to tell non-fiction stories by adapting some legitimate fiction devices. Besides, I have my father’s novel
The Directors
, and the letters he wrote to me about
A Dog’s Life
, which together with the remaining draft of my own unpublished fiction-writing, lay down various stepping stones after his own account ends, and help me to pursue my story.