Douglas Adams: The Salmon of Doubt

“With new, more-immature technologies there is a danger in getting excited about all the ways you can push them forward at the expense of what you want to say. It is therefore rewarding to work in a medium where you don’t have to solve those problems because it is a mature medium.”

After such a long fallow period he wisely notes that many of these new projects and ideas will fall by the wayside. “But I’ve been out of the mainstream of novel writing for several years and I really needed to take that break. I’ve been thinking hard and thinking creatively about a whole load of stuff that is not novel writing. As opposed to running on empty, it now feels like the tank is full again.”

LIFE AT A GLANCE: Douglas Noel Adams BORN: March 11, 1952, Cambridge.

EDUCATION: Brentwood School, Essex; St. John’s College, Cambridge.

MARRIED: 1991 Jane Belson (one daughter, Polly, born 1994).

CAREER: 1974-78 radio and television writer; 1978 BBC radio producer. SOME SCRIPTS: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1978 and 1980 (radio), 1981 (television).

GAMES: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1984; Bureaucracy, 1987; Starship Titanic, 1997.

Foreword This is a very Douglassy moment for me. Douglassy moments are most likely to involve: Apple Macintosh Computers Impossible deadlines Ed Victor, Douglas’s agent Endangered species Excessively expensive five star-hotels I am tapping at a (Macintosh) computer as I fight a deadline imposed on me by Ed Victor. Would I please see if I might provide a foreword for The Salmon of Doubt by next Tuesday?

I am in the most outrageously luxurious hotel in Peru, the Miraflores Park Hotel, Lima, enjoying the encellophaned bowls of fruit and Louis Roederer as I prepare to go upcountry in pursuit of spectacled bears, one of the least understood and most threatened mammals on the planet. Being an expensive hotel, high-bandwidth Internet connections are available in each room and I have just watched a two-hour film on my computer, showing Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, making his keynote address to the Macintosh Expo in San Francisco. The Emperor of Computer Cool has just unveiled the new I-Mac and I haven’t been able to call up or email Douglas to talk about it. A new revolutionary piece of sexy and extraordinary Apple hardware and Douglas won’t get to see it. He won’t have played with an I-Pod or messed around in I-Photo. To anyone who knew Douglas, and I am including his millions of readers here, the misery and frustration of this will be appallingly evident. It is dreadful for him because he has missed New Stuff and it is dreadful for us because the New Stuff will never now be celebrated by the acknowledged Poet of New Stuff. You see, I want to know what to think. I want to know what the new machines look like: yes, I can use my own eyes and my own sensibility, but I have got used to the superior insights offered by Douglas. He would have offered the exact epithet, the perfect metaphor, the crowning simile. Not just on the subject of New Stuff, of course. He would have found a way of linking the amiably odd behaviour and character of spectacled bears both to familiar human experience and to abstract scientific thought. Much of the world that we move in has been seen through Douglas’s eyes and become clearer. Which is to say the very confusion and absurd lack of clarity of our world has become clearer. We never quite knew how conflicting and insane the universe was or how ludicrous and feeble-minded the human race could be until Douglas explained it in the uniquely affable, paradoxical and unforced style that marks him out for greatness. I’ve just visited the bathroom and noted that the soap on offer there (tightly sealed in that absurdly unopenable disc of indestructible plastic paper offered by hotels for the convenience of their guests) is not called soap at all: it is in fact an Almond Facial Bar. That would have been an email to Douglas straight away and the email back, which can now never, ever be had, would have made me giggle and dance about my hotel room for half an hour.

Douglas was not hideously Englishly modest, which is not to say that he was vain or boastful either. His passion to communicate his ideas and enthusiasms, however, could easily trap you on the telephone, over a dinner table or in a bathroom to the exclusion of all other company or considerations. In that sense, and I don’t think I’m being disrespectful here, a Douglas conversation could, mano a mano, tete a tete, be exhausting and confusing for those unable to keep up with the passionate pinging from thought to thought.

But he could no more write confusingly than he could execute a perfect pirouette, and believe me there have been few human beings born less able to execute pirouettes without the destruction of furniture and all hope of safety to innocent bystanders than Douglas Noel Adams.

He was a writer. There are those who write from time to time and do it well and there are writers.

Douglas, and it is pointless to attempt here an explanation or anatomization, was born, grew up and remained a Writer to his too-early dying day. For the last ten years or so of his life he ceased to be a novelist, but he never for a second stopped being a writer and it is that happy fact that The Salmon of Doubt celebrates. Whether in the preparation of lectures, the execution of occasional journalism or in articles for specialized scientific or technical publications, Douglas’s natural ability to put one word after another in the service of awakening, delighting, bamboozling, affirming, informing or amusing the mind of the reader never deserted him. His is an ego-less style where every trope and every trick available to writing is used when and only when it serves the purposes of the piece. I think, when you read this book, you will be astonished by the apparent (and utterly misleading) simplicity of his style. You feel he is talking to you, almost off the cuff. But, as with Wodehouse, the ease and sweet running of his authorial engine was the result of a great deal of tuning and oily wrenching of nuts and gaskets. Douglas has in common with certain rare artists (Wodehouse again included), the ability to make the beholder feel that he is addressing them and them alone: I think this in part explains the immense strength and fervour of his

‘fan base’, if I can use so revolting a phrase. When you look at Velazquez, listen to Mozart, read Dickens or laugh at Billy Connolly, to take four names at random (it always takes a great deal of time and thought to take names at random for the purposes of argument), you are aware that what they do they do for the world and the results are, of course, magnificent. When you look at Blake, listen to Bach, read Douglas Adams or watch Eddie Izzard perform, you feel you are perhaps the only person in the world who really gets them. Just about everyone else admires them, of course, but no one really connects with them in the way you do. I advance this as a theory. Douglas’s work is not the high art of Bach or the intense personal cosmos of Blake, it goes without saying, but I believe my view holds nonetheless. It’s like falling in love. When an especially peachy Adams turn of phrase or epithet enters the eye and penetrates the brain you want to tap the shoulder of the nearest stranger and share it. The stranger might laugh and seem to enjoy the writing, but you hug to yourself the thought that they didn’t quite understand its force and quality the way you do – just as your friends (thank heavens) don’t also fall in love with the person you are going on and on about to them.

The bottom drawer of recently deceased writers is often best left firmly locked and bolted: in the case of Douglas, I am sure you will agree, the bottom drawer (or in his case the nested sub-folders of his hard drive) has been triumphantly well worth the prising open. Chris Ogle, Peter Guzzardi, Douglas’s wife Jane and his assistant Sophie Astin have done a wonderful job. A Douglas-less world is much less pleasant than a Douglas-full world, but the leaping of The Salmon of Doubt helps put off the full melancholy of his sudden departure.