Expectations: reasonable or not?
This autumn I have agreed to speak at two festivals (Cheltenham and Hemstock), the Dorset Cricket Society in Bournemouth and the Oxford Society in Cornwall. All deeply wonderful but completely unco-ordinated. I have been trying for ages to get some semblance of co-ordination in to this side of my life but it hasn’t worked. After endless alarums and excursions I think I may have a nearly perfect literary agent but apart from the fact that Christopher won’t touch e-mail he doesn’t organize speakers. I don’t want to find someone who will tout for work. Mercifully I have enough speaking work and in any case I no longer want – even if I did – my own helicopter earned by many thousands of pounds speaking to rugby clubs. However I would like to be able to say when offered an agreeable speaking engagement “Have a word with my agent”. It seems a small thing to ask but it’s proving impossible. If anyone has any bright ideas, suggestions or best of all is a nice speaker’s agent looking for a harmless drone then why not send me an email on tim@timheald.com. Meanwhile I apologise for the double-bookings, the no-shows and the misunderstandings. None as bad as the late Auberon Waugh who once gave an Oriental audience half an hour or so on breast-feeding and was then surprised to be asked questions about press-freedom, but bad all the same. I need an agent who not only understands the difference but can handle dates and demands. Please.
Increasingly I find that the things one does for pleasure are more interesting than the relatively lucrative tasks. Take the Connaught House prep school reunion. Ridiculous. Takes up a lot of time and brings no financial reward but even fielding phone calls is fun. This morning, for instance, I took one from a Balliol acquaintance, Robin Somerset, and later it was Tim Mundy who features on “my” Honours Board as one of the mantra which went “Sworder,Carver, Mundy, Joynt”. Tim got a scholarship to Dartmouth the year I was born. That makes him…but no that would be ungallant but I think he and Robin must have been contemporaries. In any case he sounded amazingly chipper. Connaught House was his second such school, the first being St. Bede’s Eastbourne who were evacuated to Oxford during WW2 and where the food was so dreadful that it was feared poor Mundy would waste away and not even pass into the Royal Navy. Instead he was sent to Connaught House where the food was good and he got a scholarship. Utter chiz.
Besides this enterprise most of the other stuff seems futile and insignificant. Perhaps it is only in old age that you acquire a taste for organized nostalgia. Or not. Discuss. Anyway it is more entertaining than writing stuff for the popular press or even books. Perhaps Lucy, who makes her living organizing special events in New Zealand knows something I don’t. This morning I got an email from Tiffy Gould who won a scholarship to Haileybury in 1956. I haven’t seen him since then but his message gave me a ludicrous spasm of something or other. Needless to say this is a totally non profit-making enterprise. Perhaps that is what makes it even more enjoyable.
On the supposed money-making front I have three books out any minute and another due in January. The first, I hope available before the Indian cricket team finish their tour, is my account of Douglas Jardine’s last tour which was to the land of his birth, India, AFTER his better known “Bodyline” tour of Australia. This is published by Methuen. Early in October Frances Lincoln publish my collected letters of my former history tutor, Richard Cobb, to Hugh Trevor-Roper among others. Later that month I am supposed to have a second whodunit, “Poison at the Pueblo” out from Severn House. In January I hope to see my appraisal of the Queen and her reign to coincide with her sixty years on the throne, in the shops. In addition I am the Royal Correspondent of the Lady and I review books regularly for the Tablet. This adds up to a spectacular success but it doesn’t seem to translate into an embarras de richesse. Writing is a silly way to make a living and one would be better off financially doing almost anything else.
This is the story of most writer’s lives. J.K. Rowling and a handful of best-selling words are the exceptions that prove this rule of relevant penury. I heard today from an old friend who is a well known and highly regarded writer. He says he feels as if he is working with leather tyres shortly after the invention of the rubber variety. I know what he means!
One curious irony is that my maternal grandfather once owned a glove factory nearby in down town Martock. Around the 1930s most English people stopped wearing gloves. At the time of his death in 1972 my father was working for W.D.and H.O. Wills, the cigarette manufacturers and the largest single employer in Bristol. Most people seem now to have given up smoking. Meanwhile I have spent my entire working life producing words for the print industry. Now print, that nice Mr. Murdoch etc etc. Ironic eh?
Maybe this is why I seem not to care so much about money and to take less and less pleasure in writing for money and more and more in doing things which have no commercial value. I suppose I am lucky in that my pleasures are relatively modest and my needs quite easily satisfied. It does seem odd, however, that one can enjoy a modicum of success and at the same time be a bit of a commercial failure. I know, I know. I am very lucky to have spent my life doing effectively what I wanted to do but it still seems peculiar that success and even perhaps a modicum of minor celebrity can be rewarded by such a financial pittance. There are plenty of more vital things wrong with the world but it does seem strange that so often financial rewards are concentrated in the hands of those who, dare I say such a thing, don’t really deserve it.
I sound as if I am complaining, and I suppose I am. I have no right to do so and I accept that. I have been lucky in a number of respects. I just sense an imbalance. I feel I stand for a certain sort of honest toil and success but other much less deserving cases make much more money. This may not matter in my case but I think it matters in a broader sense. The wrong people are rich; the wrong people are poor. This may be a Pooterism but it is still true and all the worse for being so.
As a backdrop my aged Ma – 90 plus – is chronically unwell; my grandson was on the wrong side of an argument with a cup of hot tea; a son-in-law was diagnosed with tonsilitis and found that he was alarmingly allergic to the prescribed treatment; my elder daughter’s mother-in-law died prematurely after a horrible illness. So what possible business have I got to complain about not being better rewarded for my otherwise successful work. After all, as so many publishers have told me all my life, ‘no-one asked you to be a professional writer”.
So we are not down-hearted just rather irritated. My much-missed brother, who suffered a fatal stroke when he was just sixty, used to visit us in Cornwall. If you gave him a good book, a glass of Irish whiskey and a comfortable chair, he was happy. In between sips and chapters he would look at the view and sigh. There is a lesson here, struggling as ever, to find a way out. Reasonable expectation is a reasonable expectation but it seems to be too often unfulfilled. Maybe that’s the message. I suppose I wish I knew!