see it again. Cold. Miserable. Men in flat caps with pigeons and racing dogs and ill-fitting false teeth and homespun philosophy that all sounds like a Hovis commercial. The only people who care about it are the poor bastards who have to live there. Not me. I can’t wait to live somewhere else. Tuscany. Provence. The Bahamas. To live somewhere else and be someone else. That’s the great thing about being a writer, Don. You have a perfect excuse not just to make up the story that’s in the fucking novel but your own story, too. You can invent yourself at the same time as you create the novel. It’s wonderfully liberating to become someone else. You haven’t asked my advice but I’m going to give it to you anyway. Make yourself more American, yes, even to the extent of using American spelling. After all, it’s America where a publishing fortune is still to be made. Which is why I’ve already mortgaged my house to pay for the advertising campaign that will accompany the book’s publication in the US.’
‘Jesus, John, is that wise?’
‘Probably not. But I don’t think that making big money has very much to do with wisdom, do you? It’s about having the balls to take a risk. History shows that all great fortunes are based on taking risk. What is it that T. S. Eliot says? Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. I truly believe that, Don. The greatest danger would be not to take a risk at all. Of course, the ad spend would be doubly effective if I had a paperback and a hardback out at the same time. I mean you can always sell the paperback on the tail of the hardback. So it’s a bit unfortunate that the money I’m spending will be only half as effective as it might have been. That’s my one regret about all this: that I didn’t have two products ready when I made the publishing deals.’
John sighed and lit a cigarette and stared across the yard because it was a nice day and we were sitting at the three or four tables that were grouped outside Ormond’s’ front door. His use of the word ‘products’ was telling. John has never quite lost the adman’s phraseology; even today when you meet him – twenty years after he left Masius – it’s more like talking to David Ogilvy than David Cornwell. Some writers talk about metafiction and genre and romans à clef and unreliable narrators, but John talks about the USP and the brand and focus groups and distribution and point-of-sale.
‘So what is it that you want, John? You’ve dug your tunnel out of the advertising
Stalag
. You’re out and you’re as free as Steve McQueen on a motorcycle and yet you don’t really seem like you’re happy although there is any number of copywriters who would love to change places with you. Even the ones who are gods at trendier ad agencies like GGT and AMV. To me who’s going back to write a couple of shitty radio commercials this afternoon for Ribena it seems like you have it all, pal: a three-book deal, plenty of money, some social significance, no boss, no nine-to-five, no Monday morning client meetings at fucking Perivale.’
Perivale in West London was where another dull-as-ditchwater Masius client was to be found: Hoover.
‘I could go on with that list but I would only depress myself so much that I’d feel obliged to fall on my Mont Blanc.’
John shrugged. ‘I want what anyone in this business wants, old sport: success, money, and then lashings more of both. I want the same thing that Ken Follett, Jeffrey Archer, Stephen King want when they sit down in front of the word-processor: one international bestseller followed quickly by another. My only regret right now is that I can’t write these books any faster. I mean, I’ve got this three-book deal that’s worth amillion bucks if you add together the Yanks and the Brits and the Japs and the Krauts. But at the rate it takes to write a book I’m going to need at least another eighteen months to write the next two
‘Jesus, John, is that wise?’
‘Probably not. But I don’t think that making big money has very much to do with wisdom, do you? It’s about having the balls to take a risk. History shows that all great fortunes are based on taking risk. What is it that T. S. Eliot says? Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. I truly believe that, Don. The greatest danger would be not to take a risk at all. Of course, the ad spend would be doubly effective if I had a paperback and a hardback out at the same time. I mean you can always sell the paperback on the tail of the hardback. So it’s a bit unfortunate that the money I’m spending will be only half as effective as it might have been. That’s my one regret about all this: that I didn’t have two products ready when I made the publishing deals.’
John sighed and lit a cigarette and stared across the yard because it was a nice day and we were sitting at the three or four tables that were grouped outside Ormond’s’ front door. His use of the word ‘products’ was telling. John has never quite lost the adman’s phraseology; even today when you meet him – twenty years after he left Masius – it’s more like talking to David Ogilvy than David Cornwell. Some writers talk about metafiction and genre and romans à clef and unreliable narrators, but John talks about the USP and the brand and focus groups and distribution and point-of-sale.
‘So what is it that you want, John? You’ve dug your tunnel out of the advertising
Stalag
. You’re out and you’re as free as Steve McQueen on a motorcycle and yet you don’t really seem like you’re happy although there is any number of copywriters who would love to change places with you. Even the ones who are gods at trendier ad agencies like GGT and AMV. To me who’s going back to write a couple of shitty radio commercials this afternoon for Ribena it seems like you have it all, pal: a three-book deal, plenty of money, some social significance, no boss, no nine-to-five, no Monday morning client meetings at fucking Perivale.’
Perivale in West London was where another dull-as-ditchwater Masius client was to be found: Hoover.
‘I could go on with that list but I would only depress myself so much that I’d feel obliged to fall on my Mont Blanc.’
John shrugged. ‘I want what anyone in this business wants, old sport: success, money, and then lashings more of both. I want the same thing that Ken Follett, Jeffrey Archer, Stephen King want when they sit down in front of the word-processor: one international bestseller followed quickly by another. My only regret right now is that I can’t write these books any faster. I mean, I’ve got this three-book deal that’s worth amillion bucks if you add together the Yanks and the Brits and the Japs and the Krauts. But at the rate it takes to write a book I’m going to need at least another eighteen months to write the next two
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