Brian Aldiss - Bury My Heart At W. H. Smith’s

Hamlet is not Hamlet without Shakespeare’s words. The best part of a writer exists on the printed page. Without his or her words, a writer spends his time dancing in and out, imprisoned in Elsinore.

BORNEO. If there are still white patches on the globe, then unsurveyed parts of the interior of Borneo must qualify as terra incognita . There, hiding from the depredations of the timber industry, lives a wandering tribe which regards itself as part of the jungle which encloses it.

This tribe has a religion which would interest Carl Jung. It believes that all men possess two souls, an ordinary everyday soul which deals with ordinary everyday life, and a second soul the tribe calls the Dream Wanderer. This Dream Wanderer is a free being, not under the command of the person it inhabits. Although it cannot manage everyday things, it is native in the lands beyond the prosaic.

Directly I heard of this tribe, I knew I was an honorary member. I also am inhabited by a Dream Wanderer. The Wanderer roams where it will; sometimes it leans over my shoulder when I am typing and communicates in its own fashion. If I am lucky.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name …

She was very attractive and we were getting on famously. By mutual consent we crept away from the party and found ourselves in a little warm courtyard. There we fell into intense talk, touching, and looking deep into each other’s eyes. The point came when I had to tell her I was a writer of novels.

‘Do you write under your own name?’ she asked.

Arundel Street is a short steep street leading down from the Strand to the Victoria Embankment and the Thames. If you drove down it in a car with bad brakes, you might end up in the river.

On this occasion, I was going down it on foot, slowly and cautiously. I was about to meet my first editor.

Just recently, I went down Arundel Street again, thirty years later. Much had changed. Dull concrete frontages loom where once there was fanciful brick and terracotta. Colour has gone. There are large corporations, who like concrete frontages, where once small companies clustered behind flettons.

In the fifties, there were basement windows through which a passer-by glimpsed various activities. I peered through protective railings on this momentous occasion to glimpse a tall figure in shirtsleeves who was talking and laughing.

I ascended four shallow steps, where a brass plate announced ‘Maclaren Books, Nova Publications’. I entered, and made my way down into the basement.

A long room had been made complex by an arrangement of desks, cupboards, boxes, piles of books and magazines, pinups on walls as if it were still wartime, and several men, sitting or bustling about.

I was a callow youth, yet not entirely callow and not entirely youthful. Over the previous Christmas, the Christmas of 1955, I had won the short story competition in the Observer , then the leading Sunday paper. The story was set in the year 2500 AD and entitled ‘Not For an Age’.

Now I met my first editor. His name was Ted Carnell, the great EJ, whose obituary I would write, many years later, for The Times .

Ted always dressed neatly and was courteous and pleasant. He lived in a neat little house in Plumstead and spoke with a genial Cockney accent.

He had already accepted two stories from me, ‘Criminal Record’ and ‘Outside’. He was about to take me out to lunch and solicit more stories from me.

Think of all those literary anecdotes about poets meeting Cyril Connolly or Robert Ross for the first time. I was meeting Ted Carnell.

Before we left for the restaurant, he put on his jacket and showed me a watercolour painting by the Irish artist Gerald Quinn. It depicted some enigmatic metal shapes lying on a beach under an orange sky. It was very accomplished. I liked it immediately.

‘Do you think it would be better with a human figure?’ Ted asked.

‘Worse.’

‘It’s marvellous. I was thinking of running a competition for the best story explaining what the pic is all about.’

Although the competition never materialised, Quinn’s painting appeared on the cover of New Worlds . It still looks good.

The restaurant turned out to be an ABC in High Holborn. We went downstairs, where Ted had a regular table and was on good terms with the waitress.

‘How are the bunions, Mary, dear?’ Ted asked.

‘Not so bad today, thanks, Ted, how’s yourself? I’m saving two bits of the plum pie for you. It’s very nice and going fast.’

I was disappointed. Did Sartre have similar exchanges with the waitresses on the Left Bank?

Over lunch, Ted expressed an admiration for my stories and confidence in my future career. He wanted more stories for both his magazines. Perhaps one day, he added, I would like to meet John Wyndham?

John Murray to Currer Bell: ‘Perhaps one day you’d care to meet Charles Dickens?’

How many times have I been up to London since then? Living only an hour’s train ride from London, I have never seriously contemplated moving to the capital. As a result, a little excitement remains whenever I get aboard a Paddington-bound train.

Of course I was sorry that Ted was not grander, more aspiring, and that his waitress had bunions. But there had been the sight of the Gerald Quinn.

This is what I was doing with myself at that time when I did not dare to call myself a writer.

I wrote in the evenings, when possible. For all of the day, I worked in an Oxford bookshop.

What I felt inwardly was that I was undergoing a sort of personal renaissance. Overloaded with books and prints, that shabby little bookshop seemed the richest in the world. Its dust was hallowed.

This is what it looked like to my innocent 1947 eye.

The name over the shop says Sanders & Co . It also says Salutation House; there was once an inn of that name on the site. The shop is situated in Oxford’s High Street, nearly opposite St Mary the Virgin Church. The shilling shelves are on the left as you enter.

Hang on. In the shilling shelves are many books, all at that magic price, some of them worth a deal more to the right buyer. When the shop closes, someone staggers out of the shop with a huge black shutter which locks over the front of the shelves. Me.

This was the first job I did at Sanders. At the interview with the old man, he asked, ‘When would you be prepared to start?’

‘Now?’ I asked.

‘Now,’ he said. I was set to tidying the shilling shelves. I remember one of the books I tidied, that first afternoon. It was Lalla Rookh by Tom Moore, a friend of Byron’s. Time was when no self-respecting home was without a copy of Lalla Rookh . Many editions came off the mills, some bound in Russian leather, padded with cotton wool.

Moore was a jolly man, ever prepared to sing for his supper, and he had a sharp, observant eye, as his diaries show. Sad to say, many copies of Lalla Rookh went out to Sanders’ shilling shelves during my time there. Every dog his day …

A rich but chastening environment for a budding author is a bookshop.

Sanders’ shop is a long narrow dark secretive overstocked gallimaufry of a bookshop, comparing unfavourably in roominess with the crew quarters of one of Nelson’s ships. Packed under its low beams is a profusion of ill-sorted stock. From folios to duodecimos, an impressive range of volumes presents itself or lurks in obscurity.