Memoirs of a Private Man by Winston Graham Read Free Book Online Page B

them.
    Coincident with this, there appeared on the horizon a Captain and Mrs Craddock, who had taken a house for six months in St Agnes. She was actually a real, live authoress and had published novels – many novels – under her maiden name of Elizabeth Carfrae. A great and important person indeed! She was taken up and lionized by what passed in the district for society, and she heard of my play and helped with its production and was generally very kind and generous to me. When she knew I had written a novel she asked to see it and sent it up with a note to her agent, J. B. Pinker, who had it read and sent it back, saying he did not think he could place it.
    At the end of the six months the Craddocks abruptly departed, leaving unpaid bills everywhere, and were never heard of again. It is a characteristic of some authors which I have always determined to avoid. She was published by Mills & Boon, and nowadays we all know about them: ‘ not lit., my dear, but Romance with a capital R!’ I shouldn’t have minded. Indeed I should have been delighted to be published by anyone.
    I have always valued her kindness in trying to help me.
    In all this my mother took little part. She enjoyed her bridge and my company and my chauffeuring her around. She virtually took no sides in the opinion war. I do not know, and now I shall never know, how much she believed in my ability. (Oh, she believed tremendously in my ability – was I not her son? – but I mean my ability to make a living out of writing.) She was a great one for taking the easy way, for postponing the awkward encounter, for letting things be. She had a son at home – she could just afford to keep him and herself in a pleasant degree of comfort: why should she thrust me out to make a sort of living in some uncongenial job or – even more to be deplored – push me off to live among the viceridden streets of London, to sink or swim, as many better men had done?
    But although she was unkind enough to pass on the occasional sneer, she never personally interfered nor enquired in a way which would cause embarrassment to me. I was my own man. It was a comfortable life for us both – a million miles too comfortable for me.
    I am happy she lived just long enough to see the first explosions of success.
    My father’s younger sister, Mollie, was unmarried, deeply romantic and intense about everything. She was enraptured to learn that one of her nephews wanted to be a writer. She and my parents must have discussed me at length on many occasions, but I never knew the substance of the talks. Anyway, her approach to me was much more tactful than her brother’s, and although I must have been as tight as a crab so far as my own writing was concerned we did have endless talks about literature and about writing in general. She was an aspirant and failed writer of children’s stories herself. Whether she believed any more than my father in an ultimate commercial success for me I know not, but she encouraged me in every way she could. In the end I let her read my first novel. I cannot remember whether she said she liked the book when she read it – she was always fiercely candid – but she declared passionately that it was quite wrong to keep it stuffed in a drawer and that it must be tried on other publishers. She persuaded me to retype a few pages that were dog-eared and then lovingly bound it into two volumes, with stitched sheets and cardboard sides so that it opened easily and looked like a book. I sent it off to Messrs. Ward, Lock & Co. Ltd.
    Until now I had submitted the typescript to those publishers who published the sort of books I liked to read. This was particularly so of Hodder, who published John Buchan and A. E. W. Mason and Eric Ambler and ‘Sapper’ and Philip Oppenheim and Dornford Yates, etc., etc. It cannot be said honestly that I liked Ward, Lock books. They were a grade lower down the scale, and, looking them