Stuart Campbell's Blog
Travels to my Aunt
It was last Friday when the text came through, ‘RLS in Love at Printers’. I had just driven for over three hours to visit my ancient and frail aunt at a seaside resort in Lancashire. I felt a frisson of loss not unmixed with panic. I could make no more changes to the manuscript. No matter what thoughts came to me during the night I couldn’t tinker with it in the morning. Even if I remembered someone else who deserved a mention in the acknowledgements page, I couldn’t add their name. Another enemy for life.
After the welcome respite afforded by adjusting my life to my aunt’s and getting genuinely outraged at the hideous artefacts the punters were hoping to sell in ‘Cash in the Attic’ I walked in the bleaching sunshine of the promenade at Lytham. I screwed up my eyes trying to focus on the tiny black match heads on the distant horizon where the sand eventually touched the sea. I was surprised too at the pleasure I derived from seeing seaside postcard families just having fun. I couldn’t remember which newspaper in the sixties invited holidaymakers to identify ‘their man’ on the beach and claim a prize. This time the challenge was to challenge the fraudster masquerading as an author on the strength of a five-word text. After all it is probably a criminal offence in the North West of England to impersonate a writer by secretly savouring the prospect of seeing your book in print. It would only be a few hours though before the offensive tome would be removed from the shelves on account of its crass shallowness and tired insights.
Would they even bother to return them to Sandstone Press, or quickly destroy the evidence by pulping them? Sadly drawn to the charity shops in The Square (there are at least six of them) a pattern was emerging; there is a class of writer who, on taking possession of 100 copies from a vanity publisher, stealthily distributes them round charity shops, why not? Their books are then for sale on shelves alongside other books. In fact they seem pristine and desirable when compared with their sad and abused shelf mates. Surely better than daring to rub shoulders with real books in Waterstones, risking the sympathy of friends who had long colluded with the delusion, the saving lie, that I might have a book in me, and courting the derision of real critics who could tell a hawk from a handsaw at a hundred paces.
As I tried to distract myself by worrying instead about my the day time job as a mental health trainer, it wasn’t long before I was seeing myself as the first ‘writer’ to suffer Post traumatic Stress Disorder after a devastating review from the Herald’s critic. Presumably agoraphobia would follow, meaning that I could never again be in a bookshop or library in case the panic started again. The worst aspect of this scenario would be the fact that I could never look again at the priceless (at least to me) collection of RLS first editions that line my hall at home. This was a real worry that has haunted me for some time, what if the reception given to my book is so bad that I will never again be able to take pleasure form my collection of Stevenson? I suppose it would stop me wondering if, despite the rumours to the contrary, it would in fact be possible to take them with me.
On the journey home, cruising far too fast on the motorway that snakes through the Pennines, I took a risk, and consciously left the glum security of thinking negatively. Just perhaps, possibly, maybe, RLS in Love might be quite a good book after all.