The Man Who Wrote My Novel

Most Writers get into their line of work because they are driven by a vision, a splendid passion to do magnificent and immortal things. I, however, became a writer the way other young men go into the family business. My father, Edmund Collier, is a writer of children's books. My brother, Christopher Collier, is a historian, writer of obscure articles and author of the recent Roger Sherman's Connecticut, a book so scholarly that it costs $18.50. My brother-in-law James Buechler writes short fiction and has won a couple of O. Henry prizes. My uncle Slater Brown is a novelist, hero of E. E. Cummings' The Enormous Room, and husband of a grandniece of Henry James. My aunt, Susan Jenkins Brown, is author of a book called Robber Rocks about her friendship with the poet Hart Crane. My cousin Gwilym Slater Brown has been a staff writer for Sports Illustrated for many years. Another cousin, Sargent Collier, was a writer-photographer, and another uncle, George Zipf, was a lexicographer.

The farther back you go, the worse it gets. Thoreau wanted to marry my great-grandmother, who in turn was descended from the diarist Samuel Sewell. Farther back still is Anne Bradstreet, America's first poet, and back beyond her is George Morton, author of Mourt's Relation, a kind of public-relations tract for the Plymouth Colony.

Not, mind you, that any of these people ever became rich or immortal. Most of them labored obscurely in dingy apartments trying to explain to long-suffering spouses that there was no point in getting a regular job, it was always darkest before the dawn, a breakthrough was imminent, the next book was a natural and just had to become a best seller. The only one of the lot who made a name for himself was H. D. Thoreau, and with its unerring instinct, the family turned him down. To many people, a writer is a glamorous article—a fellow experienced in the human heart who smokes a pipe and carries himself with an air of kindly authority. To me he is somebody with a drooping mustache, wearing a shabby bathrobe and telling the man from the finance company that the check is in the mail.

So you can readily understand why, when I graduated from Hamilton, I was not eager to take up the family trade. The very idea filled me with morbid dread. I envisioned an endless sequence of rejection slips, unpaid bills, hot-dog stews, cold-water flats and the officious condescension of editors from (continued on page 216)Man Who Wrote My Novel(continued from page 105) second-rate publishing houses. I had in mind instead the classic American dream: a good secure job with a large corporation where I would climb to a fat salary and a big house in an important suburb.

I assumed that my parents would be delighted by my plan to spend my days with General Motors or IBM, that the thought of somebody in the family having a little money would fill them with a sense of well-being. I should have known better. When I approached them with my idea, my mother burst into tears and my father set his jaw and wouldn't speak to me for a week. Literary relatives began busing in from Woodstock and Cape Cod and over lunch made ringing speeches about family tradition and one's duty to higher things. I usually ended up paying for the lunch, which did nothing to improve my view of the life of the mind. But in the end, the pressure was too much for me. I gave in, knuckled under and sold out. Doomed by family tradition, I took a tiny roach-ridden flat in Greenwich Village and began to write the novel that duty required.

It didn't occur to anybody, especially me, that I didn't know how to write a novel. I suppose we all assumed that this particular skill was in my blood, carried through the centuries in our genes. This was no doubt why, as the pages piled up, I began to believe I was writing the Great American Novel. It would be hailed by the critics as an instant classic and sold to the movies for a sum that would allow me to spend the rest of my life drifting around the French Riviera in the company of nubile ladies. I bought a pipe and began smoking it in the cafés I frequented and adopted a posture of benign self-assurance, which I hoped would convince girls that an affair with "James Lincoln Collier when he was working on his first novel" would make an impressive memory.

Because it has bearing on what happened later, I should say that my book was about an adolescent boy living alone with his widowed father—their ties and their conflicts. I rather fancied this particular plot, and could sec the critics remarking smartly on "Collier's deft handling of the Oedipal theme."

It didn't, however, work out quite that way. The first editor I approached was a man high in a famous publishing house who had known various members of the family back in some good old day or other and might, therefore, be sympathetic. The editor really was terribly important, and he kept me waiting for a full 45 minutes. I realized later that it was not his importance that drew out the time but his effort to figure out what to do with me. When I was finally ushered into his presence, which was heightened by carpeting that came up to the calf, he was leaning back in his chair, staring gloomily off at a corner of the ceiling.

"Won't you people ever learn?" he said.

"How do you do, sir," I said.

"Sit down, James. How's your father?"

"Fine, sir."

"And your uncle?"

"OK, I guess, sir," I said. I didn't much like the direction the conversation was taking.

"And your aunt and your other uncle and your cousin what's-his-name?"

"They're all fine, sir."

"I'm glad to hear it," he said solemnly. He swung around straight in his chair and, shielding his eyes with his hand, slowly allowed his gaze to fall on the cardboard box that held my manuscript. "How long is it?" he said. Before I could answer, he added, "You might as well tell the truth, I'll find out anyway."

"Three hundred and seventy-four pages."

That seemed to cheer him. "It could be worse, couldn't it? I remember that Civil War book your uncle wrote. He modeled it after War and Peace. Well, let me have it. I'll try to read it tonight. I might as well get it over with."

I left with a sunken heart and a week later got the inevitable note saying that while the book had considerable merit, perhaps some smaller house. ...

I toss that off lightly, but anyone who has been through this particular mill knows how you grind in bed at night when a year's dreams of riches and compliant women are blown away. Nonetheless, I gathered my courage and tried a "smaller house." Its deliberations went on at a stately pace, while I opened the mailbox day after day like a man defusing a bomb. Finally, there was a small white note explaining that "while the book showed obvious talent, perhaps some other. ..." I froze with despair and buried my artifact at the back of a closet shelf underneath my father's old Army uniform, which he once had suggested I might like to have.

But I was young, and eventually youthful optimism returned. Someday I would write another novel, and then they'd be sorry. Meanwhile, however, I inadvertently got married and became a father. My talents, if not sweeping enough to create another Oedipus Rex, proved sufficient for hammering out war stories for the men's adventure magazines. So I became what I had never wished to be—a professional writer. That would have been that, except that about five years later, as I was still struggling to escape hot-dog stews, I happened to run into an editor who had just gone to work for an extremely marginal paperback house and was in need of books that, to put it bluntly, he could get on the cheap.

Having gained broader experience with editors, I tilted my head sideways and eyed him cautiously, as a deer might survey a hunter. "Well, I do have a novel," I said. "How much are you—ah—paying?"

"Six hundred and fifty dollars," he said, sliding over the words as rapidly as he could. "We're growing, Collier. Go along with us on the price and we'll make it up to you on the next one."

He was lying and we both knew it, but the argument that something is better than nothing proved irrefutable. As a matter of fact, when the check actually arrived and it appeared that I was going to be a published author, my spirits were rather buoyed. It was cheering to think that somebody, after all, wanted to issue my opus, and I began telling friends things like, "Well, they're finally bringing my novel out in paper." I figured that if anyone wanted to assume it had been out in hardcover at some previous date, that was his problem.

I should have known better. When advance copies of the book arrived. I was once again on the downhill slide. My original title for the book had been taken from T. S. Eliot—something to do with time, as I remember. For fairly obvious reasons, the editor had retitled it Fires of Youth. This title, however, was only ordinarily offensive and didn't bother me particularly. What hurt was that he had chosen to give me a pseudonym, Charles Williams. Hastily I called the editor to find out what the hell that was all about. His explanation was macerated by a stutter I had not noticed before, but beneath the hemming and stammering, I got the gist: They assumed no writer would want his name associated with their firm.

It wasn't an explanation I chose to give my friends, however, so I tossed the copies I had been sent into a cardboard box where I kept that sort of thing and wrote the whole thing off as another of life's little disappointments. Once again that would have been that, except that around five years later, I came upon the following item in the book section of the Sunday New York Times:

Over in London, there's just been a literary happening with script sounding for all the world like W. S. Gilbert. It concerns last year's winner of the Arthur Koestler literary award for the best work done by prisoners. The award, the first ever given, went with accompanying $70 check to the author of a novel called A Father's Pride [not the actual title]. This was written by a Dartmoor prisoner—since released—named Harold Richards [not his real name]. In announcing the award a year ago September, the trustees—J. B. Priestley, Henry Green, V. S. Pritchett, Philip Toynbee and A. D. Peters (Koestler's literary agent)—said, "We believe that it will be recognized as a work of outstanding merit in its own right, independent of the special circumstances in which it was written." So far so good.

A few weeks ago, however, it was discovered that instead of being the product of true talent behind bars, A Father's Pride was a briskly plagiarized version of an American paperback novel, Fires of Youth, by Charles Williams. This one's so obscure that the trustees and Hutchinson's, publishers of A Father's Pride, have been unable to isolate the correct Charles Williams from several who write under that name. They wish to say they're sorry. The finale was written when trustees and publisher apologized for what had happened, noted the prize money had been returned, said that all unsold copies of the book had been withdrawn (3000 copies had been sold) and concluded that plans for future editions, including a Penguin, had been abandoned. The critics had liked it, too.

The plain truth is that, so thoroughly had I erased it all from my mind, at first I made no connection. But as I read the piece over again, I began to get a funny feeling that Fires of Youth, by Charles Williams, was familiar. So familiar, in fact------ But no, that was too absurd. Things like that don't happen in real life, only in books. Nonetheless, the funny feeling wouldn't go away; there was a familiar ring to that title. I carried the article out to the kitchen, where my wife was stretching a meat loaf with a couple of stale English muffins. "I don't really believe it," I explained.

"It wouldn't hurt to check, though, would it?" she said. "You must have some copies around someplace."

Firmly smothering any rising hopes, I went up to the attic—I had got out of the cold-water-flat stage by this time— and rummaged around in that cardboard carton. Seconds later, I realized that I was the winner of the Arthur Koestler Prize for the best novel by a British prisoner for 1963.

I stood there amid broken chairs and retired lawn furniture with the book in my hand, my heart pounding and my knees growing weak. I felt oddly lightheaded, as you do after drinking a whiskey sour at breakfast. The whole thing was absurd; but absurd or not, the event was freighted with the most electrifying possibilities. Try as I might to remain skeptical, hope insisted on bubbling up through my chest. After all these years, the fame and riches that had eluded me were perhaps at last to be mine. The book had won a prize. It had been chosen by famous people such as J. B. Priestley and V. S. Pritchett. The critics had liked it. Finally, I pulled myself together enough to call my agent. The first problem was getting hold of a copy of Harold Richards' edition of the book. Hutchinson's, the English publisher, duty sent one along. The title A Father's Pride was as obnoxious as Fires of Youth, but there were more important resemblances. The writer had changed the setting of the book from Vermont to Wales, had converted dollars to pounds and had fixed up things like making sure that trucks were lorries and bartenders barmen. Aside from such small matters and minor editing, the two books were identical.

Along with the book was a set of its reviews. They were, to put it mildly, enthusiastic. One reviewer compared the author to the young Hemingway, another to the young Sherwood Anderson. The Times Literary Supplement said that the author had "a striking ability to create a scene." According to the British Book News, he was "plainly an author of exceptional gifts." Irving Wardle, the former critic for the Observer, said, even after the plagiarism had been discovered, that it "still survives as one of the best novels about adolescence to have appeared in the last few years." Vogue called it "one of the best, most poignantly written novels for years." Reading the reviews left me in a trance. Phrases like "exceptional gifts" and "the young Hemingway" swung endlessly through my head. That was me they were talking about; and I was going to be famous.

Making the whole thing even more exciting was the news that, up until the plagiarism had been discovered, negotiations had been under way for French and German publication, a Penguin paperback edition and, best of all, a movie sale.

I pressed into action a troop of lawyers, agents, accountants and copyright authorities. "First find out when Hutchinson's can republish," I told the horde gathered at my agent's office one afternoon. "That'll give us leverage with Penguin and the French and German publishers. Once the movie people see it's an international best seller, the sky's the limit." Everybody nodded sagely and in a welter of cheerful good will, we all went out to the Mansfield for drinks, which I paid for—certain things are expected of an important novelist, after all.

The cheer continued unabated for about three weeks, during which I entertained my idle hours—which were considerable, as I was beginning to feel that writing for the men's adventure magazines was beneath me—with visions of transcontinental air trips, elaborate luncheons in Rule's with V. S. Pritchett, pink gins with J. B. Priestley at the Savoy Bar, quiet dinners with Arthur Koestler at his country place in Kent or whatever it was that he had. I even began to wonder vaguely whether I oughtn't to take out English citizenship. After all, with their innate good taste, the English had recognized my talents while my own countrymen had not.

Then I got a phone call from my agent. "I've got some bad news, James," he said in that querulous tone agents adopt when they are about to make it seem your fault. "The French guys don't want the book, after all."

Panic flicked a finger under my ribs. "For Chrissake, why not?"

"Wait, let me finish. The Germans don't want it, either."

"Come on, what's it all about?"

He paused fractionally. "Well, naturally, when Hutchinson's decided not to republish.... I mean, you can see their point."

I stood in silence with the receiver to my ear, listening to the sound of the ocean roaring. The sound went on and on.

"What's the matter, James, are you there?"

"Oh, yes," I said. "I'm here. I'm listening to the sound of the waves."

"What? What waves? Hey, didn't you get my letter?"

I shook my head, oblivious of the fact that he couldn't see me. "It'll probably be in the box today," I said in a toneless voice. "But I don't guess it matters very much anymore." As an afterthought, I said, "I don't suppose the movie------"

It was his turn to observe a moment of silence. Finally, he said, "I wasn't going to tell you about that right away."

I couldn't talk anymore then, but a couple of days later I trekked out to lunch with him to get the full story. "It's kind of hard to tell," he said. "You know how these limeys are, they talk without moving their mouths even when they write letters. But the way I get it, they don't want the whole thing raked up again."

That, indeed, was the story. The whole affair had been a noisome scandal in the London book world. Some of England's most eminent literary lions had heaped unstinting praise on a book that turned out—apparently—to have been a potboiler churned out by a hack—an American hack, at that. In a way, this view of the book was understandable. The pseudonym, the cheap paper, the obscure imprint, the bosomy cover all suggested the aging hack more than a literary genius burning with the fires of youth.

But it wasn't especially understandable to me. I felt that somebody—Hutchinson's, Penguin, the movie people, Parliament—ought to do me justice. But I know what happened. In England, when the old-boy league decides that one of the chaps has been embarrassed, there is a drawing in and a closing together—like a pack of rhesus monkeys when threatened by a lion—and the outsider be damned.

Some time later, when scar tissue had begun to form, I suggested to Hutchinson's that perhaps I was owed some royalties on the 3000 or so copies of the book they had sold. Hutchinson's turned to a firm called A. D. Peters for advice. In a letter, Peters commiserated with Hutchinson's for "having further problems over this sorry affair," and went on to assure Hutchinson's that legally they owed me nothing. All of which might have been reasonable had Mr. A. D. Peters been Hutchinson's legal advisor. In fact, Mr. Peters had been one of the contest judges who had praised my book so highly. He was also my own English agent in the deal.

Despite the closing of ranks by the old-boy league, my agent—my American one, that is—was able to persuade the movie people to take an option on the book. The option quietly ran out six months later, but it had been worth $750. It was a good thing. When I finished paying off the lawyers and the agents, I had exactly $14 of the money left for myself. That I had made less out of the book than anybody—lawyers, agents, Hutchinson's and the original thief—shouldn't have surprised me. The creative part of the literary game is not in the writing. The real work goes on in those carpeted offices where the transatlantic phone calls are made. As one of the people who took part in the action said, "I see the book as the grain of sand in the oyster, the necessary irritant around which I can build the pearl of subsidiary rights."

So for the third time, that was that. I used the tale to advantage on female English majors at two or three cocktail parties, and then I filed and forgot the whole dreary affair.

But the thing seemed to have a life of its own. About two years later, my agent (the American one again) happened to be in London and mentioned the book to Penguin. "Oh, quite," the editor said. "I believe we published the book, didn't we? Did rather well, as I recall."

"I don't think you ever brought it out," my agent said gently.

"Are you quite sure?"

"Yes."

"Oversight, actually. Most careless of somebody. Speak to them about it. More wine, dear boy?"

That, anyway, is the way my agent reported the conversation, possibly to make me feel good. Probably the whole thing was a good deal more mundane. It was no longer an issue, and if some money could be made, why not? I don't really know.

In any case, there I was once again, not exactly tremulous with excitement anymore, but pleased. I went around to my agent's office to discuss the thing. "Are they going to put my name on the book?"

"Yes."

"And they're going to use my version?"

"I'll arrange about that. Ah—however, there's just one thing. Hutchinson's insists on getting half of the paperback money."

"What? Why, for Chrissake, they not only stole the book from me, they refused to pay me any royalties on it."

"Yes, I pointed that out to them," he said, putting the tips of his fingers together judiciously. "They explained that if they hadn't stolen the book, it would never have been worth anything."

"Well, you can tell Hutchinson's they're not-----"

"I'm afraid they are," he said.

So I got from Penguin $206.54, and I assume that Hutchinson's got $206.54, and I settled in to wait for the Penguin edition, secure in the knowledge that a worldwide paper shortage would prevent publication, that Penguin would go out of business the day the copy editor got the book ready for the presses or that England would slip its moorings and drift out into the North Sea on publication day. At the very least, if the book actually appeared, it would surely have somebody else's name on it.

I was therefore more astonished than anything when, six months later, the mailman arrived with a package containing a dozen Penguins called Fires of Youth by James Lincoln Collier. "They even spelled my name right," I exclaimed to my wife. Then I opened the book to the first page and discovered that they had not used my version, they had used the plagiarized one.

It wasn't that I cried: I don't often allow myself to show weakness in the face of hostiles like wives and children. I felt like crying, though, and it was only four martinis later that I began to find the bright side, which was that, after all, the books were virtually identical except that one was set in Wales instead of Vermont.

That was in May of 1968, and it was just by chance that I was in London that July when the actual publication date came around. Two or three papers sent men to interview me, there was a tiny flurry in the press and, as I reflected once more on the whole episode, I began to get curious about the mysterious Harold Richards who, by stealing my book, had so entwined his life with mine. I made a few phone calls and discovered that the former car thief had gone straight and, like everybody else, didn't want the matter raked over again. However, I was able through some of the many lawyers who had been involved in the case to send him a brief note, asking him to call. Nothing happened. Then two days before my scheduled departure for the U. S., the phone rang and Harold Richards announced himself in a hesitant voice.

"We prayed over your letter, my wife and I," he said. "In the end, we decided we would have to be honest about it."

This puzzled me, but I made a date to see him and the next day I took a train for the industrial town in Lincolnshire where he worked. He met me at the train—a short, dark man wearing a cardigan sweater and corduroy trousers. We were both feeling nervous and shy. "Where can we go to talk?" I asked him.

He ran his hands nervously through his hair. "I don't want to tyke you home. I don't want anyone to know where I live. My boss is a roight bahstad, if he finds out I've been inside, I'll get the sack."

"All right," I said, "let's go to a pub." I needed a drink.

But it was after three o'clock and the pubs were closed. We stood uncertainly under a gloomy sky in the middle of a gloomier industrial town. I was beginning to feel very spooky. I remembered stories I had seen in the paper about meetings between brothers who had never seen each other before. It seemed our situation was similar—strangers who had shared the very private experience that writing fiction is. "There must be someplace we can sit down," I said a little desperately.

"There's a Chinese restaurant along here," he said.

I blinked. I had had lunch and it was too early for dinner. But we couldn't go on standing on the narrow sidewalk like a pair of lost sheep, so at 3:30 on a dismal English afternoon, I found myself surrounded by chop suey, egg rolls and cups of Lapsang souchong. The meal only compounded my sense of displacement. To find a corner of reality to hang onto, I asked him for his story.

"You see," he said, spooning the chop suey, "the book was very like me own situation. Me mum left us when I was a little kid and me brother went into the army, so I grew up with me dad, just like the bloke in the book. Then I had rheumatic fever when I was young and had to stay in bed a lot for six years. Me and Dad was close sometimes, sometimes we wasn't so close. It was just like in the book. But me brother died of lung cancer, and then Dad died when I was in me twenties. That's when I started stealing cars. There was three of us—I was the middleman. We stole three Rolls-Royces and then we got pinched and I was given five years. You know, they have lots of these competitions inside and I thought I'd try for one. First I did a portrait of Churchill. They said it was very good but it wasn't original. Then I built some things out of matchsticks, but I didn't get anything for that, either. The next thing I tried was the book.

"You notice," he said with a trace of professional pride, "I changed the ending around a good deal." He hadn't changed it much, actually; but the change he made is interesting. In my ending, the father and son quietly reconcile their basic differences during a breakfast scene. What Richards added was this:

He smiled at me. "Forget it, Son," he said. Then he came across and patted me on the shoulder. "I'll forget it, too."

"All right, Pop," I said. Then the tears started. I tried to stop, but I couldn't. They poured out, and suddenly I didn't want to stop.

I am willing to bet a pretty good lunch that when Richards had come to the ending, he had burst into tears himself.

In any case, a week after Richards was released from Dartmoor, after serving three of five years, he was informed that he had won the prize. The book was published under his title A Father's Pride to a great press. He was wonderful copy—a born literary genius in the guise of a car thief. He was interviewed on television, written up regularly and squired around to fancy restaurants. And he got engaged to the social worker responsible for rehabilitating him after his stay in prison. He even, God help us, started writing another book. Harold Richards had not lived much of a life up to that point; but now the world was suddenly his oyster.

And then a fellow prisoner, probably motivated by spite and envy, blew the whistle. He sent Sir Robert Lusty, Hutchinson's chief, a letter saying that A Father's Pride had been copied from an American book. Reported Lusty later, "Hardly daring to breathe, I requested the loan of this paperback. It came and an examination proved at once disconcerting in the extreme. Apart from trifling changes, the novel Fires of Youth was identical to A Father's Pride."

For Richards, the balloon came down as quickly as it had gone up. He gave up on the second book—"After they kicked me down, I hadn't any heart for it anymore." But if his new-found literary friends disappeared like the snows of yesteryear, his girl at least stuck with him. They got married and went off to this industrial town, where they wouldn't be known, to start afresh. By the time my letter reached him, it was all four years in the past. He was a father, his wife was not well, he was buying a little house and the last thing he needed was for word to get around town that he was a former con. "I'd lose my job for sure," he told me, sucking up the last of the Lapsang souchong.

By the time he finished this narrative, I was barely able to keep back the tears. In a choked voice I said, "For God's sake, don't worry, I won't tell a soul. Your secret is safe with me."

He thanked me with as much emotion as an Englishman allows, and then it was time for my train back to London, so I paid the bill and he drove me to the station. I had a few minutes to wait and he stayed to wait with me. There was something between us now: We had written the same book, a rare enough kind of bond between men. I wanted to put my arm around his shoulders and assure him that I was his friend, but you don't do that sort of thing with Englishmen. Instead, I asked whether he had ever been to Wales, where he'd set the book.

He nodded. "I couldn't write anything I hadn't experienced for myself," he said.

Suddenly it dawned on me that he still thought he was the author of the novel. Somewhere in some corner of his head he realized that he hadn't written it, that he'd plagiarized it, but in his gut he knew that it was his book. He must have seen me as a friendly editor or advisor of some sort—but as far as he was concerned, he was the one who had written it.

As the train appeared in the distance, he shook his head ruefully. "That's just the way it is, innit?" he said in a tone of sadness tinged with resignation. "You get a bit o' something for yerself and they knock you down again." Then the train crunched to a halt and I boarded it. I haven't seen him since.

But every story deserves a happy ending. Fortunately, there's one here—for me, at least, if not for Richards, although I expect that he'll be pleased when he finds out about it. By chance, a copy of the Penguin edition of Fires of Youth fell into the hands of a young Englishman who wanted to make movies. In the fullness of time, the book came to the attention of an independent American producer-director named Jules Bricken, Julie, whom I currently love like a brother, bought the book, hired some actors and made a movie out of it. It's called Danny Jones and it's a pretty good movie, but I may only think that because it's very faithful to the novel. It should be playing in theaters in your neighborhood about now—just 20 years from the moment I caved in under family pressure and took that apartment in Greenwich Village. In the interim, it has appeared as Fires of Youth, by Charles Williams; A Father's Pride, by Harold Richards; Fires of Youth, by James Lincoln Collier; and Danny Jones, by James Lincoln Collier. But when you come from a literary family like mine, you learn to take anything in stride.