Campbell Armstrong's newsletter - September 2007
Something about the Edinburgh Book Festival is daunting. I think it’s the idea of so many writers passing through this city in big numbers – all these egos in one place, disturbing the atmosphere, making waves, jamming radar, uttering their thoughts, reading from their works, answering audience questions. It’s all so concentrated. In my isolated world I rarely meet other writers – probably by choice, because talking shop isn’t anything I particularly enjoy.
Writers are not necessarily fascinating people, except in their own minds or seduced by their own PR. Often they are plods, scribbling away in their rooms, surrounded by disarray, open maps, reference books, encircled by scraps of paper which may contain only a solitary note hastily penned on a train journey, say, and which now means nothing.
In my notebook, for example, I come across the following: Munson says it’s serious money. I don’t for the life of me know what this means. Who is Munson? Why is he/she in my mind? What is the money? Why is it serious? Presumably because it’s a load of dosh – I haven’t got a clue. The handwriting is wired and kinked, as if the hand that held the biro was attached to a body subjected at the time to electric-shock therapy. I cannot get this phrase to fit any project of mine. Pass the diazepam.
Perhaps a past idea then – but my memory won’t jump the hurdle. This is like spectral writing. My hand has been guided by some dead hack. Did I or did I not have an idea, and if so where did it slip? The answer is probably banal. Something cartwheeled through my addled head and I wrote it down, conning myself into thinking it might be useful. And then I forgot and Munson and his money vanished into that crevice where Lost Notions go, the gunnysack of the thalamus where stillborn notions are stored to rot. Lost Thalamus – you should pardon the wordplay…
I’m digressing from the Edinburgh Book Festival. The people who organize and run this are brave, charming, and the most helpful in the world. The writers I encountered were pleasant and no doubt ambitious, but charmingly modest in their ways. I became reacquainted with a thriller writer called Allan Guthrie, and met for the first time another by the name of Ray Banks. I noticed how young they seemed. How unjaded. They’d been working their word-processors hard, I’m sure, but they seemed less spent than me.
Ray Banks said it was nice to meet somebody – to wit, me – who’d been publishing books before he was even born. Then I noticed the program notes described me as a ‘veteran’ writer, which at first I took to be a misprint. But for what? Vegetarian? Veterinarian? Doubtful. I eat meat sparingly and all I know about animals is that most of them around these parts are four-legged. I always thought of veterans as soldiers coming from long, demanding battles, or old sportsmen with grubby jocks. But veteran writer?
And then it occurred to me – my God, yes, I published my first novel in 1968, and photographs of the time depict a longhaired fuzzy hippy-type guy, and then later a kind of mullet-head. Which seemed ludicrous. Had I been publishing books for nearly forty years? Yes yes. Indeed. I checked it out. I looked it up. It was inescapable. I was sixty-three years old. Undeniable. Had I squandered my entire life in pursuit of writing the elusive masterpiece that in the ghastly pit of my heart, I knew was never going to come?
Yes yes, it was inescapable. I had. I had created a great fucking mountain of words, and characters, and tracked sales, and read reviews – good ones I thought brilliant, bad ones, well, I scoffed at – and struggled with editors, and survived some boardroom putsches, and assassinated in others, and wondered why nobody was doing the PR properly and on and on, and suddenly I felt very very tired. It was more than the mountain of words, it was the fact that the years had passed so quickly, and Edinburgh had brought me in touch with – da-dum, mortality.
Call it churlish, but I didn’t hang around the city long the next day. I creaked out to the airport and probably somebody helped the old duffer into the plane and eased him into a seat. And as the plane took off he probably glanced at the suspect structure of the Forth Bridge and slipped into the habit of all veteran writers and tugged the notebook out of the crumpled raincoat and with the ever-present biro wrote a sentence that, in the years to come – dwindling numbers – he’d forget utterly.
contents©2006 Campbell Armstrong
web design + hosting:
