I was seven or eight years old and leafing through the New York Times Book Review and The Saturday Review, both of which my mother regularly read, seeing photos of authors, most of them looking cool and composed and profoundly successful in their ties and jackets, nearly all of them with a cigarette in hand. And then, a few years later, there was Rod Serling hosting The Twilight Zone. He had that flinty, two-martini look in his eyes and, yes, he had a cigarette between his fingers. He was a writer, and I definitely wanted to look as cool as he did. Of course I had no idea what a long, strange trip it would take to get me there. Being a writer, I mean. I’ll reserve the cool aspect for others to judge.
Years later, when I had dreams of becoming a rock star (a rock god, if you please), I’d see the real ones getting out of limos or coming out of planes, standing in front of tens of thousand of fans, all of them gathered into one big group YES! Except I was a bass player, and, really, bass players have no more currency in this business than in making you feel the beat in your gut; a substantial reason to play the instrument, but note that Jimmy Page played lead guitar and not bass. He had his reasons. As did Jimi Hendrix. Bass players were just there, standing off to the side, thumping away and doing nothing flashy, soon to be relegated to the lower notes of history. I played in a band that entertained law students at their Friday night smokers at Harvard (where I most certainly did not matriculate), and the saving grace, apart from how we never rehearsed, was that we were paid quite handsomely and in cash, no less.
I soon understood that most writers aren’t really all that cool or flinty in person. Some resemble high school English teachers in their fifties, or the weird guy who lived down the street and talked to himself while taking out the trash. I came to writing later than most. Having never taken a writing course in my life, I did, however, major in English, for which I earned two degrees, and it was by reading the foundational works of literature that I received my education: works that I’ve reread often over the years.
A week after I received my masters degree I sat down and began writing, not books, but query letters to college and private school English departments, hundreds of them, hoping for a job in one of the worst markets for English teachers back in the early seventies. A school in the Panama Zone was interested in talking to me, but their little brochure mentioned the gigantic spiders that inhabited the region, so that was out. The headmaster of a Connecticut private school asked to interview me, and the first question out of this Englishman’s posh mouth was whether I was all in on corporal punishment. “Sometimes we have to resort to solitary confinement. Sometimes we just have to thrash them a bit.” That was also out. I was also writing what turned out to be a book of three long stories. I haven’t touched a bass guitar since then.
A former college professor and published author, who had become a friend and eventually a mentor (and remained so on both counts until I read his eulogy at his funeral several decades later), offered to read and discuss my first efforts. I still remember two things he said to me as I struggled to get an agent’s attention: “Be patient. One day you will fall to your knees and thank god your early efforts were never published,” and “I think if you keep at it you’ll be published in five years.” That letter gave me hope, even though my mentor was off by some seven years. And he was right about those early efforts. The less said about them the better.
Trying to become a published writer in those days was radically different from how it is now. Back then one submitted a manuscript (on paper, appropriately boxed) to only one agent or publisher at a time, which meant that you could be submitting for a year or three or even five before someone might show some interest. That has since changed, just as the boxed manuscript has been replaced by the emailed pdf. Easier all around. And these days several publishing houses can consider your work simultaneously.
I also learned early on that rejection is all part of being a writer. Many much-lauded authors have been turned down, for all sorts of reasons, and when I see, say on Facebook, someone complaining about their work being passed over, I gently try to remind them that this is the life they chose, and like death and taxes it’s pretty much inevitable. It’s just business, it’s not personal, as I always remind myself. I’ve so far had nine books published, but I’ve written something like twenty-five of them.
I ended up taking a job teaching English at the school from which I’d graduated seven years earlier, a small private school on the Hudson, not far from Sing Sing prison, located on an estate designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, who also created Central Park. During my four years there I wrote a book a year, sticking to a strict routine: I’d come home from school, sit at my desk and not get up until, in those pre-home computer days, I’d finished typing twenty pages.
They were undoubtedly not such great pages, maybe even not very good ones, but it was like a musician practicing an instrument: work at it every day. Practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect, but over time it does make an aspiring writer begin to understand what works and what doesn’t. You begin to see your weaknesses as well as your strengths. And you almost invariably get better and—always a good thing—more self-critical. Or you end up deciding it’s not the life for you. Fifty years later, with most of my former students from back then now gray-haired and retired, I still write every day.
During my time teaching English I continued to query agents, before I decided to take a chance and begin querying editors, as well. I ended up with two who were willing to read my work: one at Little, Brown, and the other at Viking: both fine and highly-respected imprints. They were patient and encouraging, though nothing more came after their kind letters back to me. After those four years of writing and teaching, tired of the brick wall that I kept banging my head against, I decided that a move might be a good idea. A fresh start. A reinvention, if you please.
So my wife and I applied for a one-year stay in England to Britain’s Home Office, where we were approved to make our move, as long as I didn’t take any employment. We had saved up a small amount from our teaching salaries (my wife was also employed by the school). As a teacher my first year’s salary was $7600. My final year’s was $9200. And you think a writer’s income is any better...? But that kind of money went far in late-seventies and early-eighties Britain. Rents were affordable, we didn’t need a car, and health care was always available and free.
But I came prepared. A year before our move I began to correspond with the Liverpool-born novelist Beryl Bainbridge (see my piece on her, and my visit to her, published in The Millions after her death in 2010: https://themillions.com/2017/03/beryl-bainbridge-tk.html). Knowing that I was intending to move to Britain, she encouraged me to write for television and radio—radio dramas were still a thing in the UK back then—so when we landed in London in mid-August I had a fifty-minute teleplay to shop around, as my latest novel was still at Little, Brown. I would later discover that the editor there had left the company, along with whatever she was in the course of reading, and no one had informed her authors. This is not uncommon, by the way. My mentor told me that his editor at Doubleday stepped out to grab lunch one midday and never returned.
Once we’d moved into our Earls Court bedsit I began querying film and TV agents. (I should mention here that Earls Court back then was known for two things: Aussies and prostitutes. On our quiet little crescent you’d walk past flats with tasteful neon signs in their windows: Model Is In, while bored-looking businessmen, some of them undoubtedly the aforesaid Aussies, could be seen flipping through skin mags while waiting their turn.)
Two weeks later I had an agent for my script. Her office was located in Charing Cross Road and she had been in the business since 1931. She knew everyone from Noel Coward to John Osborne to most of the famous actors of her day, as her brother was part of the Ralph Richardson-John Gielgud-Laurence Olivier cohort, at least until he fell overboard while travelling on the SS France. She was also a writer for Alfred Hitchcock’s television series.
On my first meeting with her she casually asked if, by the way, I also needed a literary agent for my novels, with whom her business was associated. Well, yes, in fact I did. And so, a few weeks after moving to Britain, I had two agents. It was an auspicious move that helped me establish a writing career.
My script—now lost to history—caught my new agent’s eye and she sent it around, as she did with my successive efforts over five years. Some close calls, but no sale, though I did build up a fan base, and when my first novel was published there I was asked to adapt it as a feature film by an independent London-based film company, this after Dino de Laurentiis, then at Paramount, wanted to make an offer. As my agent told me, “De Laurentiis will pay us well, but we almost certainly won’t get a movie out of it. The indie will devote much more time and interest to it, and we may actually see it on the big screen.”
Adapting it was very difficult (and would result in a very high-budget movie), as The Man from Marseille spans years and locations from pre-Revolutionary Russia to the South of France to Occupied Paris to London in the 1970s, all within the narrow confines of a 155-page novel, and so the project died a slow and painless death. I still have a copy of the script.
Now, unemployed and living on savings, without a day job, I made writing my prime occupation. One year in Britain became two, then three, then five, at which point we had become parents in Cambridge, where we’d been living for four years. And I continued to write a novel a year, and my new agent continued to send them out to all the major London houses. Again, some close calls and near-misses.
At the end of our five years in the UK we returned to the States. At this point, my London agent was running out of patience, as he hadn’t been able to sell a single book of mine. One day I sat down to write something new and different, letting the words flow without overthinking it, and five weeks later had completed The Man from Marseille. It was 55,000 words long, written in the British English I’d been comfortably working in for the past five-plus years, and, as we were preparing to return to London for three months in 1984, my agent wrote to tell me that he’d found a publisher for it, the oldest publishing house still in private hands, John Murray Ltd. My agent asked me to meet him at his London club a few days after we moved into our flat by Hampstead Heath.
I will leave you with these three facts: my agent lived in a 15th-century coaching inn in Surrey; he wore a monocle; and his London club was named after an 18th-century poet who had murdered a man during a street brawl and died penniless, before he was immortalized in a biographical essay by Samuel Johnson.
A week after meeting with my editor I signed a contract for my first published work. Years of simply keeping at it, quietly and privately, had finally paid off. The book was reviewed in the national press there, and a year later it came out in the States, where the first review to appear was in the New York Times Book Review where, as a kid, I saw photos of authors in their neckties holding cigarettes. And so my career as a published author began. And I gave up smoking over forty years ago.