Time to Be in Earnest (24 page)

By the time I went to the North West Metropolitan Regional Hospital Board, my father-in-law had retired from general practice in Ilford, and he and my mother-in-law moved to a village outside Halesworth in Suffolk. The house we shared in Ilford was sold and I had to find a new home for the four of us. I thought it would be pleasant to live in Richmond, but taking a day off to reconnoitre I was told by all the house agents I visited that even a small house or flat in this desirable borough couldn’t be purchased under £4,000. So on their advice I took a bus to Kingston-on-Thames and there found a small semi-detached Victorian cottage in Richmond Park Road for just over half that sum. It is almost unbelievable now to think that a house could be bought so cheaply. The journey from Kingston-on-Thames to London was slow, but it was a delight to be so close to the park.

It was while we lived at Kingston-on-Thames that my elder daughter, Clare, married and moved with her husband, Lyn, to America, where Lyn had been offered a job in Huntsville, Alabama, on the space programme. She did not see her father again. Connor died at home on 5th August 1964, aged forty-four years. While he was alive I hadn’t felt it possible to change my job. He would periodically discharge himself from hospital, sometimes at very short notice, and I never knew quite what I would have to face when I returned home from the office. It was not a propitious time to look for promotion or for a new job, which would only impose additional strain. But now I felt the strong need to look for a change of direction. I saw an advertisement, I think in
The Times
, inviting applications for the grade of Principal in the Home Civil Service. I sent for particulars, only to receive a reply saying that my educational qualifications were nowhere near the standard required. The following year the advertisement appeared again, but was differently worded. Now, those applicants who hadn’t a good honours degree could take a written examination followed by a series of interviews. I applied
again and was successful, coming third in the country on the final list. This wasn’t quite as impressive as it appears. Many of the questions covered the kind of work I had been doing in the Health Service, writing reports, sitting in committees, replying to letters of complaint. I was lucky, too, in finding that the intelligence test was one based on a sequence of geometric shapes, the only kind with which I have never had difficulty. My place on the list of successful candidates gave me, if not a choice of departments, at least a say in where I should be posted and I asked for either the Home Office or the Department of Education. On 1st March 1968 I entered the Home Office as a Principal
^*
and began what was probably the most interesting and happiest part of my working life.

To Edinburgh yesterday afternoon by air with Joanna Mackle, a director of Faber, for a talk in the Assembly Rooms followed by a signing. Afterwards we went to dinner with my grandson James—reading politics at Edinburgh University—in his flat in Henderson Row. James and his girlfriend have made the flat strongly individual with bold primary colours on the walls throughout, the paint applied with more enthusiasm than finesse. Like his father he is an excellent cook and we had rabbit in a curry sauce with salad and a lemon cake to follow. His aunt Mona and her husband were also in the party and we argued amiably, if forcefully, about education, about which she knows a great deal and I considerably less.

After the Assembly Rooms talk I was asked the question which comes up frequently during question-and-answer sessions: Do I draw my characters from real life? I am not surprised that this is a popular question. Characterization is at the heart of a novel and people are always intrigued about the novelist’s method of creating fictional men and women who live as vividly in the imagination as real people. The creation of characters is, I suspect, as mysterious to many novelists as it is to
their readers. I usually reply that I don’t draw characters directly from real life and then explain that, by this, I mean I don’t take someone I know and, after making a few judicious alterations to height, age, appearance or occupation, put the essentials of that person into a novel. But I go on to admit that to state that characters are not drawn from life is to be disingenuous. All characterization comes from life; where else can it have its origin?

Some writers make no apology for drawing directly from people they know. A name can be put to almost every C. P. Snow character, as it can to the most successful characters of Nancy Mitford. But for most of us the creation of character is rather more complicated.

Dickens drew directly from life. Indeed, in a letter to a Mr. Haines in 1837 he stated that he needed a magistrate for his next number of
Oliver Twist
and, having cast about for “a magistrate whose harshness and insolence would render him a fit subject to be shown up,” stumbled upon Mr. Laing of Hatton Garden. He knew the man’s character perfectly well but wanted to describe his personal appearance and therefore wondered whether he might be smuggled into the Hatton Garden office for a few minutes under Mr. Haines’s auspices. I suspect that, in today’s world, Dickens would be at constant risk of an action for libel. Similarly, he responded to a complaint from Leigh Hunt that he had been portrayed as Harold Skimpole in
Bleak House
by apologizing for Leigh Hunt’s pain, but excused himself by saying that when he felt he was getting too close to reality, he stopped himself. Besides, he did not fancy that Leigh Hunt would ever recognize himself. He ended: “Under similar disguises my own mother and father are in my books, and you might as well see your likeness in Micawber.”

Some novelists have taken pains to emphasize that they don’t draw directly from life, almost as if they find the accusation demeaning. Charlotte Brontë, writing to Ellen Nussey in 1849, protested that she was not to suppose any of the characters in
Shirley
was intended as a literal portrait. “It would not suit the rules of art, nor of my own feelings, to write in that style. We only suffer reality to
suggest
, never to
dictate.”
This is a subtle but, I think, a valid distinction. George Eliot, in a letter ten years later, claimed that there was “not a single portrait in
Adam Bede
 … The whole course of the story, the descriptions of scenery and houses, the characters and dialogue, everything is a combination from widely sundered elements of experience.” Gustave Flaubert wrote that there was nothing true in
Madame Bovary
. “It is a story of pure invention: I have
put none of my own feelings into it, nor anything of my own life. The illusion, on the contrary (if there is any), comes from the very objectivity of the work.” But it is difficult to believe that Flaubert had not at some time encountered a Madame Bovary or someone very like her.

Certainly I find it difficult to believe that any successful fictional character has been created which did not catch the first flicker of life from the burning coal of a living person. That person may very well, of course, be the author himself, and frequently is. We may not always have access to the pain, joy, disgust, embarrassment, remorse of other people—how can we have?—but our own emotions, our own pains and joys, are always available to us. These, remembered, and relived, sometimes with discomfort, and filtered through the imagination become the raw stuff of fiction.

Once the main emotive thrust is established—the essentials of character, the formative experiences of childhood and the vicissitudes of adult life—then, for me, a character takes root in my mind and is able to grow and develop. But the character never really comes alive until I begin writing. Then it feels to me as if the character and his whole story already exist in some limbo of my imagination and that what I am doing is getting in touch with a living person and putting his story down in black and white, a process less of creation than of revelation. And during the writing the character will reveal himself or herself more clearly, will display unexpected quirks of personality and will sometimes act in a way I neither planned nor expected. For in my kind of fiction, of course, no character can completely escape his author. I can’t have a murderer deciding that he would prefer to be an innocent suspect. When I am asked if my characters do occasionally take control, I have to reply that their freedom is necessarily limited, but because they change and develop as the manuscript lengthens, I never get exactly the novel I was so carefully planning.

Real people reveal themselves and are revealed by what they do, what they say, what they think and by what other people say and think about them. So it is with characters in fiction. I was interested when I read—I can’t remember where—how Evelyn Waugh responded to a reader who pointed out that he never describes what his characters are thinking. He said, “I don’t know what they’re thinking, I only know what they do.” This is the opposite of the stream-of-consciousness revelation of character, the Molly Bloom soliloquy in
Ulysses
being one of the best examples. Character can also be revealed through setting, through the personal
choice of what to wear, the outward appearance we present to the world, the objects with which we choose to surround ourselves. It is possible in a novel to describe a room, books, pictures, ornaments, or a bare uncluttered, functional space and immediately bring the owner to life, an example of the interdependence of all the elements in a novel. We are always two people: the essential self, perhaps never fully known, and the carefully constructed carapace which protects that self and becomes the person we present to the world.

For me, one of the fascinations of detective fiction is the exploration of character under the revealing trauma of a murder enquiry. Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim. Murder destroys privacy, both of the living and of the dead. It forces us to confront what we are and what we are capable of being. No wonder it has fascinated writers and readers since Cain murdered Abel.

To lunch at Penguin’s offices off Kensington High Street, where we discussed plans for the promotion of the mass-market edition of
A Certain Justice
. Then at 4:30 Michele Buck and Tim Vaughan from Anglia (now United Film and Television Productions) called to talk about the television version of the book.

It was on this day, 5th November, in 1989, when I first went to Czechoslovakia for a nine-day visit on behalf of the British Council, of which I was a member from 1988 to 1993. It was my first excursion behind the Iron Curtain except for a day’s visit to East Berlin when I was in Berlin in 1986, again for the British Council. The hotel in Prague was comfortable and modernized, but the service surly. I had a translator constantly with me and on the first morning was due to meet a journalist in the foyer of the hotel. Before she arrived, my translator suggested we should have coffee at the bar. So we perched on two high stools where my interviewer eventually joined us. I offered her coffee and suggested that we should now take our cups to the comfortable chairs around one of the low tables, since it was hardly practicable to conduct an interview while seated in a line at the bar.

My translator at once demurred. “It is not allowed,” she said. “Coffee is at the bar only.” I said that I, as a guest of the hotel, had paid for the coffee and could see no reason why we should not drink it at one of the tables. I was perfectly prepared to carry the cups back to the bar afterwards. So we went to the table but my translator was obviously not at ease. A few minutes later she broke off her translation to say, “You are right. You are a guest in this hotel. Why can’t we have coffee at this table?” I replied that she should stay close to my side, as she intended, and by the end of my visit would no doubt be as bloody-minded as a Briton.

Everywhere I sensed this sensitivity to what was or was not allowed. A small television crew with one camera came to make a film about me, part of which was shot outside the Cathedral. It was bitterly cold and afterwards I suggested that they should come back with me to the hotel for coffee or a drink. Only the director spoke English and he said that this would not be possible. The hotel was for rich foreigners and those who had foreign exchange. I persuaded them to come back and I think they enjoyed the coffee, but they were not at ease.