Naming names: a writer’s reckoning 

Coming up to my 70th birthday, I feel it is a good time to take stock.  I am not where I hoped I would be. I feel cancelled, although logically I can’t imagine anyone handing out a paper to editors saying: do not employ or publish this woman. 

The best way to analyse this positively is to look back at all those, living or dead, who helped me. During that process I will examine why they are no longer able to do so. 

One of my first and most important helpers was Karl Miller of the London Review of Books . I did not have a big publisher at that stage (1984) but was submitting poems everywhere. He liked what he saw and started to publish me regularly. He asked me to lunch. Although I liked and respected him, it was an exhausting experience with many questions. I felt a bit like Pippin being interrogated by Denethor. He told me that both Ted Hughes and I were his discoveries. A photographer was sent to my home in Hastings and my picture was put on the cover of the magazine. It was all extraordinary for a poet who had no major publisher at the time. 

Over the next year or so some small pamphlets came out and Andrew Motion accepted my work for Chatto. I never felt he was as much on my side as Karl Miller. At first, he only wanted to put a few poems in an anthology and this after I was summoned to meet him a couple of times. I think by this stage, because of the support of the London Review of Books, it was inevitable that one or other major publisher would take me on.

Karl Miller had also commissioned a Diary piece. I had been supporting my writing by occasional work as a film extra and I wrote about this experience and how it fitted with my work. When Karl Miller ceased to be editor the LRB lost interest in my poetry but the new editor, Mary Kay Wilmers, still liked my prose. I continued to publish an occasional Diary or blog with them.  When Mary Kay Wilmers left that relationship ended totally. They paid not to publish the one poem she had accepted and these days I get no answer if I submit poems or ideas for blogs. Strange and a little rude.  Ironically, I get offers to subscribe, bargain ones. I would probably be tempted if they ever bothered to reply to my submissions.

The poems in Sky Ray Lolly and Private Parts had mostly been written at the same time but were divided into two books, a year apart. Things really took off for me with the publication of Sky Ray Lolly. My first reading was with Clive James and Hugo Williams at the South Bank, so I started at the top. This was arranged by the LRB. I launched Sky Ray Lolly at Bernard Stone’s shop, and he also was one of those who influenced my life positively.  He published a couple of my minor works and set up a deal for me to sell my archives to Penn State. I have written recently here about how this deal has now fallen apart.

Andrew Motion commissioned a travel book from me after the publication of Sky Ray Lolly and this proved a pathway into journalism. Journalism was in my blood really. My father worked in all sorts of sub-editing and my grandfather was the editor of the Wide World, an adventure magazine, for 50 years. His father worked for publishers and produced simplified versions of classics for kids, a job I don’t entirely approve of.

My travel book, Journeys to the Underworld, was translated into Dutch and German. Der Spiegel sent a photographer and journalist before the German edition. Theo Sontrop of De Arbeiderspers was my Dutch publisher. He set up a mini publicity tour for me and was kind and generous. 

While I was in Amsterdam doing TV and interviews, I took a look at the sex shows with a view to writing another kind of travel literature. I had visited Toronto to read at a poetry festival and was struck by how different the sex scenes were. I devised the idea of writing about many different red-light districts around the world and did this as a sideline to more conventional travel pieces. Some of these pieces ended up with Forum , a non-pictorial kind of porn mag. Almost all its staff were women and they were very jolly. Elizabeth Coldwell, a prolific writer herself, was a keen backer of my work. It is interesting if I Google now that there is almost no record of the magazine on the internet. I suspect its proprietor, Northern and Shell, has been very good at eradicating the evidence of part of their journalistic beginnings.

I was brought up in London, but by the time I had any writing success I was living in St. Leonards, Hastings. Next door to it was home to a journalism course. Before I did much writing, I had met Andy Bull who started off in Hastings as a reporter. This was to do with an unsuitable planning permission being granted next door to the house we lived in. Years later, he was working at the Independent and remembered my name. This seemed to be a factor in my getting hired to write occasional pieces on various topics. Tom Sutcliffe also seemed to be involved in this. It went well for a while, until a couple of female editors seemed to take against me. One of them complained that my sentences were too long and complicated, like Bernard Levin’s. I took this as a compliment.

Helen Oldfield of the Guardian got me to write a monthly column called Ars Amatoria. I usually wrote about the Art of Sex or sex in the Arts, a wide brief. This worked for a couple of years before she was moved to another section of the Guardian . As with the Independent there seemed to be some ill-will from other members of staff. The times that Helen Oldfield went on holiday she laid out my column to be published in her absence, but it got cancelled, something she found annoying.

I also had reviewing relationships with the Times , thanks to Daniel Johnson, and the Telegraph , thanks to John Coldstream. When Daniel Johnson left, he continued to publish my poetry in the magazine Standpoint . But John Coldstream left to write a biography of Dirk Bogarde and does not seem to have returned to journalism.

Another backer of my work was Richard Ingrams who let me write an allotment column for the Oldie for years and then an occasional expat column after I moved to Spain. When he was axed from the Oldie, this went too. A few pieces were taken by his successors, but the enthusiasm for my work had gone.

After my first publications with Chatto, I moved to Abacus. By then I had acquired a splendid agent, Giles Gordon. I was given a wonderful advance by Julian Evans. He is a very principled man and felt forced to leave when Robert Maxwell took over the firm. We are still friends on Facebook. He is now a writer rather than a publisher. His successor had no real enthusiasm for my work, and I eventually drifted to Sinclair-Stevenson. It became part of Reed Books and Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson eventually left. Again, I lost another home for my work. My work with them was poetry, travel and the very successful Literary Companion to Sex. A novel was published by Peter Owen, another person who liked my work. I also got on very well with his editor, Gary Pulsifer, and he published a volume of my poetry when he started his own firm, Arcadia. Sadly he developed cancer and the firm was sold, though he continued to do some work for it. At that stage he persuaded them to do ebooks of some of my old titles and the newer book on red light districts.

So, there was a long pattern of impressive writers, editors and journalists backing my work and most of these relationships failing after a while, for a variety of reasons. Some moved on to other writing, for instance. Others died.

There were others also who tried to help en route. Patrick Hughes was one of those who wrote about me. It was one of the first of a positive deluge of profiles in major newspapers that gave me a larger reputation for a while than that of many poets. He connected me with the Chelsea Arts Club. Molly Parkin, his former wife, interviewed me on a BBC Wales radio show. What I read was relatively mild, but it upset some of their viewers — though they were not at all disturbed by a comedian on the same show talking about “Pakis”. 

I met Douglas Adams on that show and we remained friends. He tried to persuade his agent, Ed Victor, to take me on. It did not happen. I liked Ed Victor and we sometimes chatted at parties, but I may have been too strange for him. Giles Gordon soon took me on, but after his death in 2003 I was never able to get an effectual agent again.

Chris Priest was a fellow resident of Hastings and gave me good advice, like joining the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS). He also sometimes gave me lifts to Sussex Authors’ talks. I hate the idea of many literary groups, such as poetry workshops, but these were different: here were some very interesting writers amongst the members, such as Raymond Briggs. Many of the meetings were in Brighton, an hour’s drive from Hastings. Chris even gave me a lift when I was heavily pregnant. He told me he had researched hospitals en route just in case. We remained friends and exchanged emails right up until his recent death from cancer. He was a very fine writer and an amusing man.

My literary career was already in total decline by the time I left the UK for Spain in 2002. All the poetry readings and invitations to literary parties had vanished and major publishers no longer wanted to look at my work. From the publication of Sky Ray Lolly in 1986 to about 1994, I had masses of readings around the country, profiles in newspapers and magazines and a lot of work for radio and TV. Gradually this all faded away. It was a kind of vicious circle. If you don’t get any journalistic work, a big publisher does not want to publish you and vice versa. Without a big publisher, you won’t get reviews or readings at literary festivals…

There are a handful of writers who get round this, and some are very kind to other writers. I had several readings with Michael Horovitz and Attilah the Stockbroker, aka John Baine. The latter is also a talented musician. A musician can set up his own gigs and invite others to join him. John has done this successfully across decades. A couple of the gigs I participated in also used John Cooper Clarke, who was great fun.

Out of the blue in 2008 I was offered publication by Chris Hamilton Emery of Salt. I chose to do a Selected Poems rather than a new collection. My latest poems were on widely differing subjects and needed to be part of more than one collection. Salt did not seem to have the same sort of clout as my previous publishers, and I only managed to get one reading in Cork Literary festival and hardly any reviews. Salt itself almost closed later when literary grants ran out and has not been willing to publish further books by me. 

I survived in part with Royal Literary Fund grants and in part by translating and copywriting work. I am thankful to a couple of women translators, Wendy Wise and Sarah Crosby, for encouraging me to work for French agencies that employed many freelancers. It was lower pay than my journalism, but it kept me going, Mostly I translated Spanish but instructions sometimes came in French, so it kept me on my toes. The pleasantest copywriting job was commenting on more or less all Domenico Scarlatti’s 555 keyboard sonatas for Radio France. Fortunately for me, nobody else on the agency seemed to want to touch this with a barge pole. Some of the translation jobs were bizarre. One of my earliest involved short ads for prostitutes. I had to Google for some of the slang. Such words do not end up in respectable dictionaries.

So, I arrive at the age of 70 with stacks of unpublished work and many ideas left to be put on paper. But nobody wants to pay me for articles these days. It is galling now when I see an article with inaccuracies which I could have done better. I saw this happen with the Guardian . I had offered them one on the Mar Menor after the disaster where its fish died. They claimed they weren’t interested, but got someone else to do it and thanks to a lack of local knowledge there were inaccuracies. Living nearby and having walked all that area I knew they had it wrong.

I am taking the Amazon path for some of my work. English publishers will not read my latest novel, so I have translated it into Spanish. My son is currently checking it for errors as he is perfectly bilingual. Very soon I will put it on Kindle and let him have any royalties. This is not exactly where I wanted to be, but it is somewhere. I have lost the will to keep submitting to agents, the vast majority of whom do not reply. I also have doubts now about the lengthy waits required for small independent publishers. This is where I am, but I am always open to offers.

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