BECOMING
A WRITER
I did not
want to
become a writer until 1972, when I was twenty (20).
Prior to then, I had wanted to become a
musician, and had assiduously practised both guitar and piano in the
hope of
one day either joining a progressive rock band or getting such a band
together
myself. Why I changed my mind in 1972, I
don't exactly remember; though it probably had something to do with the
fact
that I first fell in love that year and started writing poetry to
commemorate
the fact. Probably I half wanted to become
a professional musician for another two years, though I can distinctly
recall
telling a friend, in late 1973, that I had absolutely no desire to
either join
a band or get a band together myself. By
then, I must have become dedicated to a literary career.
My first excursion into
writing took the form, as I intimated
above, of lyric poetry, which isn't altogether surprising really, since
most
youths who are in any way disposed to literature begin by writing verse. At the time, I was a humble clerk in the
I left my job partly for
health reasons and partly because the
pay was relatively poor. But I also left
it because I had long nurtured a private ambition to do something
better with
my life, and writing seemed, in view of the relative paucity of
alternative jobs
for someone like me, by far the best bet.
But I didn't succeed in finding a publisher for my first novel
when it
was completed three months later, and I continued to write in vain
thereafter,
whilst all the time becoming more depressed.
I briefly returned to my old clerical job at the ABRSM the next
year,
having persuaded the manager to re-employ me.
But by then I was suffering too much from a stomach ulcer and a
variety
of other personal and domestic problems to be capable of staying in the
job for
very long, and so, once again, I handed in my notice, conscious, as
never
before, of the degree to which I had changed, in the meantime, and
effectively
become a writer.
Thus in November 1977, after
barely six weeks back as a clerk, I
found myself on the dole again, and that is where I still remain at the
time of
writing this little autobiographical sketch, nearly five years later. In that time, or rather from June 1976 to
July 1982, I have written several works, which have all been typed-up
by me in
due course. They include novels, essays,
dialogues, short prose, and various other projects of a like-literary
nature. I have not had one of these
works published, though I've continued to send or to take typescripts
to
publishers on a regular basis. I don't
believe that they were rejected because of poor quality but, on the
contrary,
because of superior quality, which is to say, because of too radical
and
theoretical a mould. Had I been writing
adventure stories, thrillers, detective novels, or whatever, the
outcome might
well have been different. But, partly no
doubt because of my Southern Irish origins, I was always too
intelligent and
noble, too deep and, as the British would see it, 'thick', a person to
be
capable of writing, in an overly commercial vein, for popular
consumption. Thus I have experienced a
fate apparently
reserved for all or most outstanding writers, the fate Schopenhauer
alluded to
in his writings and which men like Baudelaire and Nietzsche also
experienced. I'm not in the least ashamed
of this fact, for it testifies to my intellectual integrity and moral
superiority over lesser, i.e. commercial, writers.
I am morally and creatively beyond the
bourgeois establishment, and have accordingly been rejected and
outlawed, as
though a subversive threat, whilst inferior intellects have been
accepted and
praised. I came to the conclusion that
my works were not wanted in
