1995 saw the publication of my first novel, Nailed By The Heart. As the saying goes, I was as green as I was cabbage looking. I hadn't a clue what happened to a manuscript after acceptance. The whole process of transforming the three hundred or so pages laboriously churned from my Amstrad daisy wheel printer into a real book seemed a thing of ineffable mystery. Should I write to my editor suggesting typefaces? Should I telephone and say I'd prefer such-and-such an artist to produce the cover illustration? Do you take the Jeffrey Archer approach and scream down the telephone the moment you think that the sales team aren't devoting one hundred percent of their energy to the cherished product of your imagination?
But would I appear pushy if I tried the hands-on approach? If I didn't, though, would my editor think I was being indifferent to what, afterall, is a crucial part of the book's birth process?
These were the questions that zipped through my brain at night to ruin my beauty sleep and leave me grouchy and even more anxious.
Anyone travelling that road to publication could do worse than checking out "The Story Of A Book" by Richard Middleton. Although it was published the same year the Titanic made its first big splash in the headlines, it's still a superbly accurate portrayal of a first-time author's bewilderment at actually having a book published, and what happens to the author's precious manuscript once it vanishes from his sight into the publisher's offices. I suspect, too, that authors who are no longer publishing virgins are going to experience a smile – or wince or two – of recognition as the hapless hero has the rose-tinted glasses snatched from his eyes and sees what professional publishing is, and always has been: a commercial enterprise. But this tale is no diatribe against publishing, but simply telling it how it is.
Which is a little bit strange because its author, Richard Middleton, never had a book published in his life-time. He was born in Middlesex in 1882; on leaving school he became an insurance clerk – an occupation he detested. Determined to become a professional writer, he quit his job in 1907 and wrote short stories (some supernatural) that tended to be either lighthearted pieces like "The Ghost Ship" or so heart-rendingly poignant that if you set them to music they wouldn't be out of place on an album by The Verve or REM. Constantly broke and permanently in morbid spirits he went to Brussels in 1911. There, aged twenty-nine, he killed himself with chloroform. His final note said he was 'going adventuring again.'
The stories he left behind are worth reading, and his "Story Of A Book", especially, rings so fresh and so true it could have been written yesterday. The story's hero does see his book in print. And to the surprise of everyone it is, initially at any rate, a success. Only for the life of him the man can't write a second book. Like the centipede who's asked the question, 'But how do you actually walk?' and ends up paralysed in a ditch unable to figure out how, the author loses the ability to construct another coherent story.
"The Story Of A Book" closes with the hero spending yet another evening labouring over a chapter of his doomed second novel. In disgust he throws away the pages and leaves the house.
With my book I wondered about cover illustrations, jacket copy and marketing. Middleton's hero, however, walking the nighttime streets, wonders about something far more profound. Now comes my favourite bit... this is more than drop dead gorgeous writing: it is sublime:-
'But he could not help noticing that London had discovered the secret which made his intellectual life a torment. The streets were more than a mere assemblage of houses, London herself was more than a tangled skein of streets, and overhead heaven was more than a meeting place of individual stars. What was this secret that made words into a book, houses into cities, and restless and measurable stars into an unchanging and immeasurable universe?'