and I did not know how you went from sitting in front of a blank screen to sipping Bellinis with Jeanette Winterson. So, for rather longer than planned, I got a job in a bookshop. I signed up for six months and stayed for five years.
To be precise, it was a chain of bookshops. During my time, I worked in three different branches, the last of which was an elegant superstore in a posh quarter of West London. After a couple of years there, I was allowed to run the fiction section on the ground floor, a responsibility I loved. It was a spectacular sight, shelf after shelf of new paperbacks; prize-winners, potboilers, whodunits, whydunits and all points in-between. The manager of the shop took the view that we were the chain’s London flagship store – the managers of the Hampstead and Charing Cross Road stores told their staff the same thing – and therefore we had to offer what he called ‘perfect stock’. ‘Perfect stock’ meant never running out of anything. Woe betide you if, on recommending Robertson Davies to a customer, he went to the shelf and discovered a space where, say, The Lyre of Orpheus should have been. In this atmosphere of edgy competitiveness, good retail sense often took a back seat to hawk-eyed completism. So when the previous incumbent suffered a nervous breakdown and went on semi-permanent sick leave, I had been the obvious candidate to succeed him.
Every day, I would patrol the fiction bays, roaming up and down with a publishers’ stocklist, hunting out the telltale gaps. In the process, I inadvertently absorbed the names of many authors of whom I had never heard before. I also became familiar with the more obscure corners of the well-known writers’ back catalogue. So, for instance, Muriel Spark became not just the author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but also The Public Image, The Takeover and Territorial Rights. I quickly came to know the works of Miss Read, Hubert Selby Jr and Lisa St Aubin de Téran, though only by sight, spine-out. It was here and not at university that I learned all you really needed to appear indisputably bookish, i.e. titles and names. The shop was a finishing school for bullshitters.
In the never-ending pursuit of ‘perfect stock’, one looked more kindly on those authors whose work did not sell rather than those whose work did. Of these perhaps my favourite was Iris Murdoch. No one ever bought any of her books, except The Sea, The Sea, which had won the Booker Prize in 1978. The popularity of the likes of Virginia Andrews, Louis de Bernières, Jilly Cooper or Robertson Davies posed a persistent threat to 100 per cent coverage. But every time you arrived at the tail-end of ‘M’, stocklist in hand, you could be certain of finding The Black Prince, Henry and Cato, A Severed Head, et al., exactly where you last left them. And this had the notable side-effect of giving you an easy fluency – a superficial depth of knowledge – in Dame Iris’s entire oeuvre.
I met my future wife in that shop. I also met Morrissey, Dustin Hoffman and Princess Diana.fn1 And because we were on the publishers’ promotional circuit, I also made the brief acquaintance of a lot of writers, amongst them Iris Murdoch. At a Booker anniversary evening, she gave a reading from The Sea, The Sea to an audience of about two dozen people in front of the gardening books upstairs.fn2 Dame Iris was petite, with white hair and an impish smile, and she appeared to have come to the reading in her slippers.
fn1. Morrissey bought two copies of a book by Bruce Foxton (bass) and Rick Buckler (drums) of The Jam about what a bastard Paul Weller had been to them by splitting the group and abandoning them to fend for themselves. ‘That’s not supposed to be very good,’ I said. ‘Mm,’ smiled Moz, ‘but they’re not for me.’ Do you think they were intended for Morrissey’s estranged Smiths bandmates Andy Rourke (the bass guitar) and Mike Joyce (the drums)? I do.
Princess Diana, in the period when she was separated from Prince Charles and trying to assert her independence by making tentative outings to McDonald’s, Harvey Nichols, etc., chose something from the psychology section about the effects of bad fathering on children with eating disorders. The manager of the shop immediately forbade any of us from contacting a tabloid newspaper with this scoop, though I am revealing it here for posterity. Towards the end of the transaction, a paparazzo ran into the shop and tried to snap Diana and, to a far lesser extent, me. The next morning, the manager wrote to Kensington Palace to assure them that this breach of privacy had nothing to do with us and the Princess should feel confident that she could return to our portals whenever she wished, discretion was our watchword, etc., etc. It was that sort of shop.
Dustin Hoffman, though thoroughly amiable, said and did nothing worth noting nor did he buy a book. This should in no way be taken as an implicit criticism of him. One well-known actress, a local resident of the shop, pulled lots of memorable stunts which would probably amuse and enthral you but even twenty years later I am reluctant to publish them and give this individual the slightest whiff of publicity, even though she is no longer with us. It was not unknown for the entire staff to hide in the stockroom rather than deal with her petulant, ill-mannered demands. She was one of the rudest human beings it has ever been my misfortune to encounter but I am not going to reveal her identity here. Let’s just say it’s a pity her character doesn’t get stabbed through the throat with a camera tripod specially adapted for the purpose at the climax of [NAME OF FILM REDACTED BUT IF YOU’VE GOT ANYTHING ABOUT YOU, YOU’LL KNOW WHAT IT IS] and leave it at that.
fn2. Though the event was held at the behest of Booker, Dame Iris may have chosen to read from her most recent novel The Green Knight, rather than The Sea, The Sea, and I am writing about the wrong book. Thank you, the then-future Mrs Miller, for the declarification.
‘I love your work,’ I told her, which was something one said fairly often to visiting authors but which on this occasion had the merit of being wholly misleading yet completely true.
All this came back to me as I began The Sea, The Sea. However, these feelings of nostalgia, guilt and remorse – or was it pride? – were soon swept away in a wash of bewilderment. Although the prose was bright and clear, and the scenery reassuringly English and domestic, this was quite the most head-scratching of all the novels I had tried so far. Not to put too fine a point on it, this was one weird book.
The narrator is a retired theatre director called Charles Arrowby. The story begins just as he has moved from London to a town on the edge of the North Sea, taking up residence in a ramshackle house called Shruff End, where he plans to write his memoirs – the book we are reading – and ‘to repent of a life of egoism … I shall abjure magic and become a hermit’. To this end he catalogues, in the fruitiest tones imaginable, his every swim, thought and meal. (‘Food is a profound subject and one, incidentally, about which no writer lies.’) These early pages of The Sea, The Sea were transparent enough. Relocating to the coast in search of a profound life change, making lists of food and drink in fiddle-faddling detail: the man was a buffoon.
However, the novel soon spins off into a kind of insanity, as Arrowby’s self-obsession runs wild. He sees, or hallucinates, monsters from the deep. He is visited by a succession of friends and associates from London, who come and go seemingly at will. He indulges a renewed passion for his childhood sweetheart Hartley, who coincidentally lives in the nearby town with her husband. Is this really happening or not? The marriage is violent and unhappy, he tells us, but is it? She clearly wants Arrowby to leave them alone. Her adoptive son turns up, just like that. Then, using the son as bait, Arrowby kidnaps her. Meanwhile, he relays all this madness to the reader in a rococo monologue comprised of philosophical aperçus, finely-wrought pen-portraits of the sea, the sea, and periodic descriptions of really horrible meals.
It was the meals I found most perplexing. As noted earlier, food was not my strong point. I had some enthusiasm for the stuff – it keeps one alive, after all – but little knowledge; I had never really learned to cook properly. So, when presented with some of Arrowby’s more bumptious menus (‘I imagined that the only book I would ever publish would be a cookery book!’), I was at a loss to know what they stood for. Was this fine dining or foul? For example, here:
Spaghetti with a little butter and dried basil. (‘Basil is of course the king of herbs.’)
Spring cabbage cooked slowly with dill.
Boiled onions served with bran, herbs,