But something had happened to my work. I had taken it for granted, perhaps, my luck, and luck must never be taken for granted. Life was too busy. I grew too busy. Nick was successful, at the BBC, and the price of success was making many features, ambitious features involving travel, and other programmes which, his craftsmanship insisted, could not be made in the time allotted. He had to work evenings, and sometimes weekends. My agent had encouraged me to leave Heinemann in search of more money, and negotiated a sizeable advance, a £75,000 two-book contract, with Jonathan Warner, the young head of HarperCollins’s literary fiction list, Flamingo. Lost Children came out in 1994. Now it was time to write the second. But Jonathan had committed suicide, leaving a wife and daughter, not long after Lost Children was published, a dreadful piece of news that hit everyone hard. The RSI had slowed my production, and Nick couldn’t help with Rosa very often. I was left, in the end, with less than six months to write and deliver the second novel. I went too fast. I rushed it. I fluffed it. The book I delivered, called at that stage The Keeper of the Gate, but eventually The White Family, would one day bring me great satisfaction, but unwisely, I submitted something less than perfect.
It was unlike me; I am a control freak, and I know that my work is not ordinary, not universally pleasing or lovable, and so needs the armour-plating of technique. Do not let yourself be vulnerable.
But it’s hopeless advice. We’re all vulnerable. Tread carefully, young writers in the literary jungle.
My animal luck (vii)
the literary jungle
In retrospect, I can see that what happened was a motorway pile-up: too many causes. Two years earlier, researching Lost Children, I made some visits to a centre for the homeless in east London, and sat in on their group therapy sessions. Many of the stories stretched back to childhood; one man had been sexually abused in a Catholic children’s home; one woman abandoned by schizophrenic parents. But more of them had foundered in middle age, when too many things went wrong at once. Within the same few months, a relationship ended, they were made redundant, illness struck, they were declared bankrupt. And they fell through the net. They were worryingly like all the people I knew; they had no special tragic flaw.
I saw it in theory, then I learned it in practice.
1995: a watershed. I was forty-six; Rosa was eight. My agent had moved to Canada; I was passed on to the excellent managing director of the same agency, who was known as a good agent, and a gentleman, but the truth was, he had not specifically chosen me, and inheritance did not seem the safest route. (Yet my editor at HarperCollins, too, had inherited me, after the death of the editor who chose me. I should have seen the signs, I should have seen the danger, but I lived day to day, writing, Rosa, Rosa, writing, pell mell, myopic.) I was very ambitious, am ambitious still. It felt as though this was make or break. I was on my way to fifty. I had to get up there.
It’s hard to recreate all the reasons for the crash. If I had a tragic flaw, it was arrogance, which sounds like ignorance, and came from it. I simply thought I could do what I wanted. If you don’t come from a literary background, perhaps it takes you longer to learn the rules? And I had stayed curiously isolated. Even though I had been one of the ‘Best of Young British’, even though I had been a Booker judge, I had mostly stayed at home with Nick and Rosa, writing books and getting on with my life. I thought that the writing was all you had to do. It seems extraordinary, looking back at it now, but I’d probably been to less than a dozen literary parties, all told. I didn’t see that they were important. I see it now; you get out there and smile, and meet people, and are seen on the circuit, which means you are recognised as ‘one of us’. Moreover, you learn lessons from the group. I should have attended to a stray remark Jonathan Warner made when he paid so well for me: ‘I love your work, but I was surprised, when I asked around the office, some people hadn’t heard of you.’ I wasn’t on the circuit. I remained naïve, and my thought processes don’t bear examination.
Perhaps, now Jonathan was dead, I should move from HarperCollins, even though I was in the middle of a two-book contract? I had no personal links there any more, and I’d heard of people doing just that. We would get a big advance, and pay them off (yet advances, all round, were too big, in the ’80s. I saw the crest building, I didn’t see the crash.) I had moved before, I could move again (but you can’t keep moving on for ever. Too many moves give you a bad reputation.) Yes, I felt my age meant I had to climb, but I hadn’t considered it was also a drawback. I thought I was still seen as a young contender. At forty-six, it was a dangerous assumption.