Dreams only make sense when you’re asleep. Wake up, sit down for breakfast and begin relating what you’d dreamed only a few hours earlier, and it all turns into something so extraordinarily boring and illogical that you begin to doubt your own subconscious. Is this what I’m really made of? you wonder, along with everyone else at the table having to endure listening to you. You’re a writer, after all, and everything you think or dream up has got to be closer to gold than to this dross you’ve just shared with your loved ones. Yeah, right.
Except for when, years ago a few months before my first novel was published in the UK, I dreamed an entire novel, beginning to end. The whole thing: the plot, the subplots, the climax that turned the whole story on its head. I had even dreamed up a title: The Novotny Affair. It was a spy story, it was set in Europe during the Second World War and after, and unlike my usual dreams, which were closer in logic to an old Bugs Bunny cartoon, it made perfect sense. So I sat down to write it.
An English screenwriter—I was then writing primarily for the British market, having lived in England for over five years and where my first novel was initially published—is hired to create what these days we might call a virtual spy: someone who doesn’t exist, but whose reality needs to rely on an ace radio operator, a set of credible facts, and a scenario that would land him in Occupied France and give him a narrative to follow: a wartime tale involving a fictional character designed to create chaos to distract German intelligence from an impending invasion from over the Channel.
I had done a great deal of reading about France during the German Occupation, in English and in French, and had used some of what I’d learned in my first novel, The Man from Marseille. I had even been in touch with a former intelligence officer then working as an advisor at the Imperial War Museum in London to verify a few technical details.
My protagonist is brought to a house in Hampstead (where my wife and daughter and I last lived in London a year earlier), where the operation would be based. The team was made up of the writer, a radio operator, as well as staffers from the UK’s SOE—the Special Operations Executive—responsible for espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance on the European continent.
All of this was in my dream. The spy about to be “dropped” into France is a Czech national named Anton Novotny (Where did that come from? I have no idea), and the moment he lands—all of this read by the Germans in the radio transmissions they’re meant to be intercepting—he gets to work. There are agents already on the ground prepared to commit acts of sabotage on railway lines and in assassinations all attributed to Novotny. Within weeks it becomes clear to those in London that the Nazis have accepted Novotny as a real person responsible for these acts. They just can’t find him.
But it’s the Soviets who also have an eye on him, as, once the war is over, Novotny has taken on a whole new second life: as someone whose wartime deeds could be very valuable to Russia. And they know just where to find him and what they intend to do with him.
I’ll leave the plot hanging there. I sent the novel to my London agent, who sent it to my publisher. My editor felt it fell between two stools, as a spy novel and as literary fiction, and thus passed on it. But this very elaborate dream stuck with me, and years later I rewrote it as The Man Who Was, turning the writer into a Hollywood screenwriter whose one big success, Passage to Berlin, starring Paul Henreid and Ida Lupino (with a theme song later recorded by Frank Sinatra with lyrics by Johnny Mercer) heading an all-star cast and released by Warner Bros., had inspired the American OSS to recruit him to create a character with a full and varied background as well as an ongoing scenario. It was a long book, some nine-hundred pages, and it still sits on my computer’s hard drive.
But you know what they say about dreams: they’re not meant to come true. Until they do.