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 West End, but I wrote romantic poetry in my spare time at Merstham, Surrey, where I was then living.  When, through force of domestic circumstances, I was obliged to move to north London, where my mother and stepfather shared a flat, I still continued to write poetry, and this was my main literary endeavour up until June 1976, when I began to write my first novel, having left - though not for the first time - my clerical job at the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, in Bedford Square.

     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 England, since they would threaten the status quo by raising too many uncomfortable questions.  I have progressed ever closer to the Truth, and have actually attained to it in my latest, highest works.  I live in a kind of Promethean isolation amongst intellectual pygmies, despising the English for their commercial baseness, pedantic nit-picking, pragmatic superficiality, and fundamental pettiness of mind, which revolts against anything too deep and imaginative, spurning Celtic criteria, one might say, from an earth-bound Anglo-Saxon standpoint.