‘No man is a success to himself’ wrote Graham Greene. I am feeling this acutely, as I turn 60 on September 1st and enter the Decade of Reckoning for uncomfortable life truths. As somebody whose literary ambition was only wanting to be a bestselling English social novelist, it’s been creeping up on me that if one hasn’t written that Big Novel by one’s sixth decade, then perhaps throwing in the quill is the only dignified thing to do.
In a desk drawer in my study, there is a cream envelope, postmarked September 1987. That August, I found myself sitting two tables from the Graham Greene in Chez Feliz, a fish restaurant just inside the walls of the old Antibes port. He was 82, and lunching with his mistress Yvonne Cloetta.
The following day I returned with a copy of a short story I had written in an envelope marked ‘c/o Monsieur Greene’ and handed it to Felix, Le Patron. Two weeks later, back at home in Shropshire, I received a typed letter from Greene, signed with his spidery writing, saying that he liked the story ‘very much’ and it promised well for my literary future. He advised me on how to get published. I was 18 and blindly imagined that literary success came easily.
How different it all seemed back in the whirligig of the late 1980s when I read English at Magdalene College, Cambridge – the college of Pepys, Empson, T.S. Eliot and Oscar-winning screenwriter and novelist Julian Fellowes (who published his first satirical novel, Snobs, in 2004, when he was 55). In the holidays, I worked for publisher Bloomsbury and took my pick from unsolicited manuscripts to write reader reports. But no, I thought, my debut novel would never end up in some Soho basement ‘slush pile’.
At Cambridge, I wrote my dissertation on the satire of Tom Wolfe; on leaving I became a graduate trainee at the Times on £14,000 a year. Greene had started out as a sub-editor on the paper, so what better place to start as a literary postulant?
In 1989, Wolfe wrote an essay called Stalking the Billion Dollar Beast, calling on writers to embrace old fashioned reporting – à la Dickens, Zola and Balzac – to write sweeping, realistic novels that captured the lurid pulse of modern life. He called it a ‘literary manifesto for the new social novel’ and, secretly, this became my gospel. One night shift at the Times, I remember looking around the Wapping staff canteen at the Murdoch hacks eating their burgers and thinking, ‘if this lot are my would-be Zola competition, how could I fail?’
Naturally, ‘Meet Your Heroes’ was another part of the literary novicehood. After being appointed as US West Coast Correspondent in 1991, I moved to LA aged 25 and wrote an account of my adventures entitled Educating William: Memoirs of a Hollywood Correspondent. The jacket said ‘He lives in the Hollywood Hills and is writing a novel set in LA.’
Memorably, I downed Negronis with a tanned Martin Amis – he was only 42 at the time – at the Century Plaza Hotel in LA. Amis had just signed a two-book deal with Random House for over $500,000 and told me he wasn’t in LA because he had any overdraft that needed paying off. ‘Money isn’t really it’ he told me. ‘I was already going where the real money is – the Literary Novel’.
But despite a reputable agent (Gillon Aitken) and many lunches with him at La Famiglia, my LA literary novel (entitled ‘The City of Punishment’) was never written. Nor has any other appeared over the last 30 years despite my converted pig shed in Shropshire – where I keep all my papers – being covered floor-to-ceiling in research and half-written manuscripts in moulding boxes. My output runs to a black sexual comedy play about the philosopher A.J. Ayer, a biography of Graham Greene and two volumes of memoirs.
Do I have any Freudian diagnosis for this paltry opus? Amidst decades of journalism and publishing, including running several magazines, I still dared to hope. I thought a literary breakthrough was on the cards when I won ‘Writer of the Year’ in 2022 at the Independent Publisher Awards. Still four years until I’m 60, I thought as I clutched the PPA award… But neither agent nor publisher called.
Connolly’s excuse of the pram in the hallway doesn’t cut it as I didn’t see a pram until I was 48 as a member of the Old Dad’s Club. When I finally met Tom Wolfe in 1998 at his fancy canary yellow Virginia-style apartment on East 79th Street, I asked why it had taken him nearly a decade to write A Man in Full. He replied: ‘Mr Cash, I cannot write if I have money in my bank account.’
But Wolfe’s Writing Rule cannot apply in my case as not having a bank account sloshing with advance money has always been the norm. My problem, to be honest, has been the opposite – lack of financial stability (writing to deadline to pay bills) combined with too many hangovers, too much emotional chaos and not enough Greene-like 500 words-before-lunch discipline.
So perhaps now really is the time to finally spike that dream of writing what Wolfe used to call his ‘would-be Big Novel’. He was still only 58 when Bonfire of the Vanities, his first novel, was published in 1987, with Tom looking very relieved standing on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum in New York in trademark white suit.
The age deadline of 60 was always a last hope to cling onto. After all, journalist Daniel Defoe didn’t publish Robinson Crusoe until he was 59 and seven months. My only consolation is that I’m not the only would-be Big Novel failure out there of my generation. Thankfully, no Zola from Wapping has ever appeared. I still have a month to go. What is needed is some literary Viagra.
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