Writing

Green-eyed Gertrude Bell belongs in Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, that slab of velvety antique that enthralled the English (they were not yet British) in the love-affair phase of their relationship with the Arabs. County Durham-born to a wealthy industrialist father, Bell (1868-1926) was a key player when the Powers tried ineptly to mould the Middle East, as the Ottoman Empire crumbled. She is well covered in the literature and appears in a large hat alongside Churchill in conference photographs. But as Pat Yale announces in this new book: “Her time in Turkey has been largely overlooked.” Bell traveled extensively in that country before the first world war (starting in 1899) and in its aftermath.

I was dozing, a little hungover, on the morning flight from Prague to London, when I saw them for the first time. Ten men on a beach, dragging a landing craft up the sands. Where? Can’t tell yet. When? The fourteenth century. Who? Don’t know, but they look like trouble. I woke up. Through my AirPods I heard the Blur singer Damon Albarn growling the final song from their 1997 album Blur. “In these towns, the English army grinds their teeth into glass / You know you’ll get a kicking tonight...” I opened my laptop and started making notes. The men came surprisingly well-formed. They were soldiers of fortune in the Hundred Years’ War. They already had names. Faces. Talents. Foibles. Yearnings. Secrets. I wrote down as much as they could tell me before the plane landed.

"No, Lisa." As rejection letters go, it was admirably concise. I’d made an attempt at “autofiction,” that amorphous genre which inhabits the space between autobiography and fiction, and this was the entirety of my editors’ response. Any writer who has been at it for any length of time will have received Dear Johns from publishers, but is two words a record? It was something to cling to, at least, during the five further years it took for the book to find a home. Eventually, a French house took it, and Les Femmes de mes amants staggered unobtrusively into print in June this year. Obviously, I should have set my sights on Paris from the first.

"It feels almost like there is money in writing again.” So the historian and New York Times bestselling author Dan Jones tells me. Is he referring to increased book sales, or lucrative adaptation deals? Not this time. Instead, he’s discussing Substack, which launched in 2017. It has now become the platform of choice for writers to develop their careers on their own terms, without having to give substantial percentages away to agents, publishers and lawyers. For years, authors have felt that they have been little more than galley slaves, flogging themselves and their wares for the profit of multinational corporations. Now, finally, they have been given an opportunity to take back control of their own careers and destinies. The format is a simple one.

My first novel, A Dog’s Life, was largely autobiographical. It described my grandparents’ life, my parents’ marital exploits, and my own limping attempts to become a writer. But since I seemed unable to harness these first two subjects to the advancement of the third. Then I suddenly saw how I might carve out the first quarter of this spacious family saga and make it a self-contained novella covering 24 hours of family life. Heinemann offered me an advance on royalties of £500, which was ten times what they had given me for my biography of Lytton Strachey. Roland Gant did not wish to publish A Dog’s Life until the two Strachey volumes were out of the way.