There’s a wonderful line in that classic cult movie, Withnail & I, when Richard E. Grant, as the dissolute actor, Withnail, tells a Welsh farmer, “We’ve gone on holiday by mistake”.
Well, I became a full-time writer for seven years by mistake.
I applied for my first job in 1974, after swanning around for two months post-University. My mother had let me know, subtly, that, lovely as it was to have my company all day and every day, she didn’t intend underwriting my 40-a-day Players No. 6 habit indefinitely. So I wrote off to the University’ Careers Advisory Service – which I had carefully avoided having any contact with until that point – and expressed a preference for a career as a Gentleman Publisher. A list of vacancies arrived by return post and I applied for the first one on the list - Academic Press of Camden Town – and popped along the next day for an interview conducted in a room overlooking Regent’s Park Canal. I joined their publicity department the following week.
It really was that easy back when!
Six months later – tired of writing, designing and organizing the printing and mailing of publicity leaflets for massively expensive books with titles such as Aberrations of the Symmetrical Optical System – I applied for publicity jobs with two less academic London publishers. One was Weidenfeld & Nicholson, and the other was New English Library. The Weidenfeld interview in, I seem to remember, Covent Garden, was conducted by a fierce elderly woman in a boiler suit who asked me for my views on abortion (I must have given the wrong answer – I never heard from them again). The NEL interview, in Barnards Inn, near Chancery Lane tube station, was conducted by a neat, energetic young chap in a blue suit, who asked me for my views on Harold Robbins, their main source of income. I evidently gave the right answer, because I joined them some two weeks later.
My time at NEL has taken on a certain hallucinatory quality in retrospect. Drinking habits really have changed over the years: I seem to remember spending one very long lunch in a gloomy wine bar with the Literary Editor of the Daily Mirror (yes, every paper had one then) during which we consumed five bottles of red wine and half a bottle of port between us. Try doing that now and not getting fired instantly. The only complaint I received from my masters at the time was that I wasn’t spending enough time or money schmoozing.
When I wasn’t getting pie-eyed with Fleet Street’s finest, I was touring the country with the likes of Harold Robbins, James Herbert, Stephen King, Irwin Shaw and Pele, and meeting heroes such as Martin Amis, Peter Ackroyd and Christopher Booker. Mind you, there were some real stinkers along the way – most notably Harold Wilson’s former secretary, Marcia Falkender, and a pompous Tory MP I shan’t name, because he’s still in the Commons. I even spent an evening watching ex-Herman’s Hermits singer Peter Noone performing his greatest hits – every last bloody one of them - at the Batley Variety Club, while we ate pies and mash and drank copious quantities of the fizzy diuretic ditchwater that passed for beer back then.
I put on so much weight in three years of expense account living that my GP referred me to the local hospital where a diet doctor put me on a course of tablets that – I kid you not – actually made me forget to eat! I felt fabulous all the time. I became a party animal and started getting by on four hours’ sleep a night. I felt capable of anything. NEL had published three books I’d written during my time there, and the last one sold over 100,000 copies in paperback. When an American publisher offered to publish it, the blood surged to my head and I handed in my resignation.
A few days after departing NEL, I was boasting to a friend that I had lost over four stone almost entirely through willpower.
“So, nothing to do with the drugs in your bathroom,” he replied.
“Well, they’ve helped a bit,” I admitted.
“Amphetamines will certainly do that,” he said.
“Come on, it’s something harmless. It’s just…”
“Speed.”
“Oh,” I said.
So that was why I’d been so full of energy for the past few months. And why I’d thrown away a good job to become a writer on the basis of one minor success.
I felt all the energy drain out of me in an instant.
What have you done, you (formerly) fat fool!
I reached the diet doctor’s target the following week and he informed me that I was free to go, never to return. I had meant to bring up the issue of the drugs, but I’d thrown them away, and, apart from feeling hungrier than I had in a while, and returning to a normal sleep pattern, there had been no other noticeable effects. I just shook his hand and thanked him.
Somehow, I managed to sustain a relatively lucrative writing career for the next seven years. Looking back, I’m not sure whether I should have tried to wring my diet doctor’s neck for flooding my body with dangerous drugs – or whether I should have shaken his hand more vigorously for giving me , albeit unknowingly, the false courage to do something adventurous.
What I can say for sure is that I have never again forgotten to eat. Ever!
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