Michael Allen - A Writer's Guide To Everything Important - The Omnibus Edition Of Seven Essential Guides For Fiction Writers

Ross’s life at this time is exhausting just to read about. It must have been impossible for anyone to try to live that life. By the time Raintree County was published, Ross Lockridge was completely burnt out, mentally and physically, and he was damn near certifiably insane.

When published, on 5 January 1948, the book was a critical and commercial success. It became, inevitably in view of all the publicity, a ‘bestseller’; it was eventually filmed with Elizabeth Taylor in a starring role. But on 6 March of that year Ross Lockridge killed himself with the fumes from his car exhaust.

This is not a very cheerful story, is it? And there is more, if you can bear it: because we really ought to consider the parallel life of Tom Heggen. And after that we will see if any useful lessons can be learnt from these dreadful events.

Tom Heggen was, on the face of it, a much tougher and more street-wise character than Ross Lockridge. After college, where he did lots of journalism, Tom served in the Navy during the second world war, and you can’t spend a few years in the Navy without learning a little bit about life. (One former boss of mine told me that, during the war, he had been the only man on his ship who had never had a dose of the clap.)

With the war over, Tom began to put together some stories, based on his shipboard experiences, and he too found an enthusiastic publisher in Houghton Mifflin. The publisher came up with the title Mister Roberts , since Roberts was the character who linked the stories together.

Very early on in his relationship with Houghton Mifflin, however, Tom became aware of a circumstance which was to cause him endless trouble: the publisher viewed his first book as just that – the first in a series of novels. ‘Publishers are insatiable,’ Houghton’s editor-in-chief wrote to him, ‘and I am already beginning to think of the book that will follow Mister Roberts .’

Tom was thinking about it too, but he could not get started. ‘Honest to God,’ he told a friend, ‘I don’t know what to write.’

Mister Roberts was well received when it first came out, and before long the idea of adapting the book for the stage was raised. After a false start, Tom eventually formed a working partnership with Joshua Logan, who was then a highly prestigious and successful theatre director.

While Tom was trying to convert Mister Roberts into a stage play, in collaboration with Joshua Logan, he was still trying to write novel number two. But he couldn’t write and he couldn’t sleep, and was prescribed fast-acting barbiturates as a cure. However, even Seconal did not work and he tended to drink his way into unconsciousness. He was only five feet eight to begin with, and he soon lost weight.

When finished, the stage version of Mister Roberts proved to be smash hit on Broadway. There was so much laughter during the last rehearsal that it added twenty minutes to the running time. Emlyn Williams (of all people) was drafted in to make some cuts, which he managed to do without damage.

Being the author of a Broadway hit meant that, like Ross Lockridge before him, Tom Heggen became rich and famous. Attractive women were very pleased to have dinner with him. He was earning $2,000 a week from the play, at a time when that was serious money.

But there were still some huge creative problems. Tom found that, as a writer, he had become dependent on the collaboration with Joshua Logan. His creative juices just did not flow without help. ‘I don’t know how I wrote Mister Roberts ,’ he told a friend. ‘It was spirit writing.’ And Joshua Logan, of course, had other fish to fry.

Tom tried psychoanalysis (our old friend Freud again, useless as usual) and he was by now addicted to barbiturates; he was popping twenty pills a day, on top of copious amounts of booze. He knew that he was doing himself irreversible damage.

On Wednesday 18 May 1949, Tom Heggen’s cleaning lady found him dead in the bath. The cause of death was described by the Medical Examiner as ‘Submersion in fresh water in bathtub. Probable suicide.’

As with Ross Lockridge, there really isn’t any doubt that Tom Heggen committed suicide. But even if we were to accept that either of these writers died by accident, the fact is that they were both dead men walking around like zombies. They had risen to dizzy heights. They each yearned to write another book. But neither of them knew how to do it. Success and all that goes with it had destroyed them completely.

What are we to make of these two grisly stories? They are such horrible case histories, so depressing to read about, that I wonder how and why I managed to stagger through John Leggett’s book about them. I suppose the answer to that conundrum is that the book confirms, with dramatic force, my long-held view that the ambition to be a writer can seriously damage your health. And in extreme cases it can even kill you. Hell, I even wrote a book about it: The Truth about Writing .

I defy anybody to read John Leggett’s Ross and Tom and tell me that they seriously want to be a famous writer. The dangers and disadvantages are great. And as for the rewards – well, they tend to be both brief and illusory.

Ah, you say, but if I was a big success I wouldn’t suffer the fate of Ross and Tom. I could cope better than they did.

Possibly. But I have to say that the recipe for disaster is a combination of factors which are really quite common.

To suffer the fate of Ross and Tom you need to be:

(i) wildly and absurdly ambitious;

(ii) the author of a first novel which makes heavy use of autobiographical material;

(ii) inexperienced in narrative technique, with a relatively small number of words under your belt (anything less than a million won’t do).

Ross Lockridge also had a head full of romantic nonsense about artistic integrity and writing the Great American Novel, which is again very common.

Those simple factors are all that’s required for you to become another book-world casualty.

If you are unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, you too could end up with a number-one bestseller, a Hollywood film contract, lots of new friends, and a score of people hammering on the door and demanding that you repeat the trick. And that you go on repeating it for the next twenty years. And yet you have no idea how you did it the first time, and certainly no idea how to do it again.

Oh, and one other thing is needed if you are to become an enormous success. You have to be the one person in a million or so whom the gods of the book world choose to honour with their favours. ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.’

Let us hope that you escape that fate. The next time you get a rejection slip, try to think of it as a merciful release.

5.4 Final conclusions

My essay about Ross and Tom, which you have just finished reading, was first written in 2004, as a blog post. In checking it through for inclusion in this book, I wonder now if I was a bit too dramatic in trying to put you off any serious idea of becoming a successful writer.

Perhaps. But you must make a judgement.

There is, however, one important difference between the year 2004 and today (2013). That difference is the huge change in the publishing world which has come about through the digital revolution.

Throughout this book I have tended to write with reference to the traditional route to success. That is to say, I have assumed that, when you have completed a book (or some similarly substantial work), you will try to find an agent to represent you; you will expect the agent to try to get you a contract with one of the big publishers; and you will then expect to pursue an orthodox career, producing the expected new book every year (or so), and hoping for the occasional small prize, nibble of interest from film or TV companies; and so on.