*********************************************
ON WRITING HUMOUR
"Writing comes easy. All you have to do is stare at a blank piece
of paper until your forehead bleeds.
"I find it ludicrously difficult. I try and avoid it if at all
possible. The business of buying new pencils assumes gigantic
proportions. I have four word processors and spend a lot of time
wondering which one to work on. All writers, or most, say they
find writing difficult, but most writers I know are surprised at
how difficult I find it.
"I usually get very depressed when writing. It always seems
to me that writing coincides with terrible crises breaking up my
life. I used to think these crises had a terrible effect on my being
able to write; these days I have a very strong suspicion that it's
the sitting down to write that precipitates the crises. So quite a lot
of troubles tend to get worked out in the books. It's usually
below the surface. It doesn't appear to tackle problems at a
personal level, but it does, implicitly, even if not explicitly.
"I'm not a wit. A wit says something funny on the spot. A
comedy writer says something very funny two minutes later. Or
in my case, two weeks later.
"I don't think I could do a serious book anyway. I'm sure
that jokes would start to creep in. I actually do think that comedy
is a serious business: when you are working on something you
have to take it absolutely seriously; you have to be passionately
committed to it. But you can't maintain that if you are going to
stay sane. So when I talk about it to other people I tend to be
flippant about it. I'm always so glad to have got through it, I say,
`It's just jokes'. It's a relief.
"What I do now on many occasions is have, say, an
inconsequential idea for a throwaway line that seems quite neat,
then I go to huge lengths to create the context in which to throw
that line away and make it appear that it was just a throwaway
line, when in fact you've constructed this huge edifice off which
to chuck this line. It's a really exhausting way of writing but.
when it works...
"Often the things that seem frivolous and whimsical are the
hardest to get right. Take the opening section of Life, the
Universe, and Everything, which is something I'm quite pleased
with. They are stuck on prehistoric Earth, and then suddenly
they find themselves on Lord's Cricket Ground, which comes
about because they chased a sofa across a field. It all sounds
inconsequential or ilIogical or whatever, but completely belies the
fact that I tried over and over again, and rewrote that bit over and
over, going absolutely crazy with it until I eventually found the
right elements to create the air of whimsical inconsequence, if you
like. So I could come right-up at the end of that long section with,
`They suddenly found themselves in the middle of the pitch at
Lord's Cricket Ground, St John's Wood, London, with Australia
leading and England needing so many runs to win' (I forget the
exact quote). Now, in order to chuck away a line like that at the
end of the chapter, you needed all that stuff about Ford coming
back and explaining what he has been doing in Africa, which was
obviously very unpleasant, and then him trying to explain about
the flotsam and jetsam, and eddies in the space-time continuum
(which was really a very silly joke, but you are allowed the odd
silly joke) and the sofa, and so on.
"lt required all that just to be able to suddenly say Bang!
Here they were somewhere else, because if you do just say that
without getting all the rhythm right, then it doesn't work. It
wouldn't have been enough for them to just be magically
transported without it suddenly being a tremendous surprise
coming at that moment.
KIt's those kind of effects that take an awful lot of
engineering, when you don't necessarily know what the answer is
going to be, you are just thrashing around in the dark trying to
find something somewhere that's going to help you get to that
point. And when you are operating within a convention which
says (or seems to say) `anything goes', you have to be extremely
careful how you use that. I think if I have a strength as a writer it
is in recognising that and trying to deal with it, and if I have a
weakness it's that I don't always deal with it as well as I would
like to be able to.
KAnyway, the reason I liked that bit where they appeared at
Lord's so much was that I knew what a huge problem I had
solved and the fact that it wouldn't appear to the reader to be a
transition from one bit to another. And the reader would feel,
`Well, that was easy, wasn't it? You say Here they are in one
place, then Here they are in another?' But for that to be easy you
have to do an awful lot of engineering."
- Douglas Adams,1984.
********************************************************
Making Movies
In 1979 Douglas was approached with an offer he found almost
irresistible: a Hitchhiker's film. All he had to do was sign a piece
of paper, and he would have $50,000 in his hand. The only
trouble was that what the director seemed to have in mind was
"Star Wars with jokes".
"We seemed to be talking about different things, and one
thing after another seemed not quite right, and I suddenly realised
that the only reason I was going ahead with it was the money.
And that, as the sole reason, was not good enough (although I
had to get rather drunk in order to believe that). I was quite
pleased with myself for not doing it, in the end. But I knew that
we were doing it for TV anyway at that time.
"I'm sometimes accused of only being in it for the money. I
always knew there was a lot of money to be made out of the film,
but when that was the whole thing prompting me to do it, when
the only benefit was the money, I didn't want to do it. People
should remember that."
A couple of years later, Terry Jones (of Monty Python, and a
scriptwriter and director in his own right) decided that he would
like to make a Hitchhiker's film. The concept was to do a story
that was based solidly in the first radio series, but pretty soon
Douglas began to have second thoughts. He had done it four
times (radio, theatre, book, record) and had recently done it for a
fifth time (television), so decided that, in order to avoid the
problems of repetition that would occur if he wrote the same
script again ("I didn't want to drag it through another mediumI was in danger of becoming my own word processor"), they
would create a new story that would be "totally consistent with
what had gone before, for the sake of those people who were
familiar with Hitchhiker's, and totally self-contained for the sake
of those who weren't. And that began to be a terrible conundrum
and in the end Terry and I said, `It would be nice to do a film
together... but let's start from scratch, and not make it
Hitchhiker's.' Also, Terry and I have been great friends for a long
time, but have had no professional links. And there's a slight risk
you take, when you go and do a professional job with a friend,
that it might spoil things. So we didn't do it."
In 1982 Douglas went to California with John Lloyd to write
The Meaning of Liff, and it was then that he was approached by
two people with whom he got on extremely well, Michael Gross (Gross was originally an artist and designer for Natwnal Lampoon, and was the man responsible for the famous cover showing a dog with a pistol to its head, captioned `Buy this magazine or we shoot the dog!') and Joe Medjuck, about a Hitchhiker's film.
At the time Douglas was excited by the possibilities of what
could be done with computers, having seen some amazing special
effects and technical work (imagine real computer graphics, done
with computers!), and decided that he would write the film. He
moved to Los Angeles, taking his girlfriend Jane Belson with him,
bought a Rainbow word processor, and began to write.
Mike and Joe were producers working for Ivan Reitman,
then known only for Animal House, now better known for
1984's smash-hit Ghostbusters, and unfortunately there was not
the same rapport between Adams and Reitman as there had been
between Adams and the other two.
Douglas now describes 1983 as a `lost year'. He and Jane hated
Los Angeles, missed London and their friends. He found it hard
to work, spending much of his time learning how to work a
computer, playing computer games, learning to scuba dive, and
writing unsatisfactory screenplays.
Transforming Hitchhiker's into a film hit two snags. The first
was that of organising the material: "There are inherent problems
with the material. It's a hundred minute film, of which the first
twenty-five minutes are concerned with the destruction of Earth;
then you start a whole new story which has to be told in seventyfive minutes, and not overshadow what went before. It's very
very tricky, and I've had endless problems getting the structure
right. With radio and television you have three hours to play
with.
"The material just doesn't want to be organised. Hitchhiker's
by its very nature has always been twisty and turny, and going off
in every direction. A film demands a certain shape and discipline
that the material just isn't inclined to fit into.
The other problem was that Ivan Reitman and Douglas Adams
did not see eye to eye on the various drafts of the screenplay. Again
Douglas started using the phrase of "Star Wars with jokes".
Unfortunately this time he had already signed the contracts, was
signed up as a co-producer, and had accepted amazingly large
amounts of money to work on the film.
The versions of the script done in Los Angeles were attempts
by Douglas Adams to meet Reitman half-way, of which he says,
"They fell between two stools - they didn't please me, and they
didn't please them."
Los Angeles was getting Douglas more and more depressed. He
began to feel he was losing touch with the very things that had
made him write what he did anyway. Eventually he decided to
leave.
"I didn't realise how much I hated LA until I left. Then the
floodgates opened, and everything came out. It wasn't a good
period for me, nor a productive period. I had a slight case of
`Farnham' - that's the feeling you get at 4.00 in the afternoon,
when you haven't got enough done. So there came a point when
we all decided to disagree, and I'd come back to the UK where I
felt more in touch, and try to get it right to my own satisfaction."
Douglas returned to England, where he began to work once more
on the screenplay of the film, in addition to beginning work on So
Long, and Thanks for All the Fish and the Hitchhiker's computer
game.
At that time he told me, "What I'm trying to do with the film
is use a completely different selection process to that which went
into the TV series. We are trying to show the stuff you didn't see
in the 1'V series. So if you go back to the book, and find all the
things not in the TV series. . . that's the film!
"Also, a lot of the film comes to have a completely different
rationale. I've just put the scene with Marvin and the Battletank
into the film, from the second book."
Liff, and Other Places
Douglas Adams and John Lloyd have collaborated on a number of
projects. Some have already been mentioned. One, Dr Snuggles,
was an animated television series for which two episodes were
scripted by Adams and Lloyd. Dr Snuggles was "a cross between
Professor Branestawm and Dr Dolittle" and produced by a Dutch
television company for the international market.
One of their episodes apparently won them an award,
although neither of them has seen either the award or the series.
Dr Snuggles was essentially a children's series, and while the
Adams/Lloyd scripted episode I have seen (Dr Snuggles and the
Nervous River) was superior to the run of scripts for the series,
fans of Douglas Adams's or John Lloyd's work are missing
nothing if they haven't seen it. The plot, however, was science
fiction: Dr Snuggles meets a nervous river too scared to go down
to the sea because huge chunks of the sea are disappearing. After a
number of adventures, the Doctor goes off into space to discover
that the water is being taken by aliens who thought we didn't
want our water because we kept throwing rubbish into it. They
give the water back, Dr Snuggles ties it to the back of his
spaceship and returns to Earth.
Another project of theirs was rather better known in Britain,
but for some reason not a success in the US: a curious book
entitled The Meaning of Liff.
It began during the holiday in Corfu, which John and
Douglas had booked to write The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy, but during which, for reasons already chronicled, only
Douglas wrote the book. They were sitting in a tavern, playing
charades and drinking retsina with a few friends. They had been
drinking retsina all afternoon, and after a while decided they
needed a game to play that did not require as much standing up.
Douglas remembered an English exercise he had been set at
school, fifteen years earlier, and suggested it as a game.
The rules were fairly simple: someone would say the name of
a town, and someone else would say what the word meant.
As John Lloyd explained, "It was a fantastically enjoyable
holiday. For a month we got drunk, and we'd stay up all night
playing these incredibly long games of charades.
"Then we began playing this placenames game. Near the end
of the holiday, I started writing them down, not having very much
else to do. By the end of the holiday, we had about twenty of these
things, some of the best ones in The Meaning of Liff, like `Ely'the first, tiniest inkling that something has gone terribly wrong.
"Many of them were to do with Greece, sitting in
wickerwork chairs and so on. And we kept doing them after the
holiday was over."
Douglas clarified the concept on a press release for The
Meaning of Liff:
"We rapidly discovered there were an awful lot of experiences, ideas
and situations that everybody knew and recognised, but which never got
properly identified simply because there wasn't a word for them. They
were all of the, `Do you ever have the situation where. . . ? or, `You know
what feeling you get when...?' `You know, I always thought it was just me...' All it takes is a word, and the thing is identified.
"The vaguely uncomfortable feeling you get from sitting in a seat
which is warm from somebody else's bottom is just as real a feeling as the
one you get when a rogue giant elephant charges out of the bush at you,
but hitherto only the latter has actually had a word for it. Now they both
have words. The first one is `shoeburyness', and the second, of course, is
`fear'.
"We started to collect more and more of these words and concepts
and began to realise what an arbitrarily selective work the Oxford English
Dictionary is. It simply doesn't recognise huge wodges of human
experience.
"Like, for instance, standing in the kitchen wondering what you
went in there for. Everybody does it, but because there isn't - or wasn't
- a word for it, everybody thinks it's something that only they do and
that they are therefore more stupid than other people. It is reassuring to
realise that everybody else is as stupid as you are and that all we are doing
when we are standing in the kitchen wondering what we came in here for
is `woking'."
Following John Lloyd's disappointment with the
Hitchhiker's book, he was similarly disappointed over a comedy
series he was meant to have been co-writing, To the Manor Born,
starring Penelope Keith. Instead he found himself producing a
BBC 2 satire show, Not the Nine O'Clock News, starring Pamela
Stephenson, Rowan Atkinson, Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones.
After a while Not the Nine O'Clock News became a major
success (which, according to Douglas, meant that John in his turn
spent a while being as obnoxious as Douglas had been in the early
days of the success of Hitchhiker's), and spawned a number of
records and books.
One of the books was the NOT 1982 calendar. Lloyd found
himself stuck for material to fill in space at the bottoms of some
pages, and at the tops of some pages, and in quite a few of the
middles, so he dug out 70 of the best definitions (he had
accumulated about 150) and inserted them into the book as
extracts from The Oxtail English Dictionary.
Faber and Faber, John's publisher, were very enthusiastic
about the definitions.
"They said, `This is the best idea in the whole calendarwhy don't you do it as a book? This time it was the reverse
situation: I hadn't expected Douglas to be very interested in
doing it as a book, so I expected to do it on my own. Then
Douglas said, `Let's do it together' and 1 said, `Yes!', I can't stand
doing things on my own, which is one reason why I'm a producer
and not a writer."
The Meaning of Liff was written in September 1982, in a
rented beach hut in Malibu. The two of them sat on the beach,
watched the ocean, drank beer, thumbed through a gazetteer, and
thought up definitions. Douglas also started learning to scuba
dive at this time. (He finished learning to scuba dive in Australia
two years later, and has a number of wise sayings on the subject
of sharks.) It was published in November 1983 by Pan (in a copublishing deal with Faber and Faber) in a remarkable format
(153mm by 82mm); a very small, very slim, very black book, with
a bright orange sticker on the cover that proclaimed, "This Book
lVill Change Your Life ! "
The `selling point summary' that went out to reps included:
"Small format for discreet consultation on retrieval from inside
pocket", "Authors expert in field" and "possible early quote from
John Cleese's psychoanalyst" as selling points.
On its release it went to number four in the Sunday Times
bestseller lists. However, overall it didn't do as well as a
Hitchhiker's book or, for that matter, a Not the Nine O'Clock
News book.
As Douglas said at the time, "Normally I don't enjoy writing
at all, but it was a real pleasure doing this book. But what's really
nice is that my family and so on, who say, `Yes dear, it's nice
about Hitchhiker's' - John's say the same about Not the Nine
O'Clock News - love this book. My kid brother and sister like
it.
"lt's selling briskly, but not as well as it could do. I think
that's because people have no idea what it is - it's totally
enigmatic and anonymous, unless you happen to recognise our
names. In both cases the product is more famous than the names
- but on the other hand it has terrific word-of-mouth.
"But I enjoy it. I can reread it, whereas normally I cringe
when I read my stuff."
The Meaning of Liff also kicked off a minor controversy in
the newspapers. Although it was well, and extensively, reviewed
(primarily because it was so easily quotable - despite the
presence of the word `Ripon', described in The Meaning of Liff
as: `[of literary critics] To include all the best jokes from the book
in the review to make it look as if the critic had thought of them'),
there were also accusations of plagiarism.
Having just undergone a traumatic time trying to get a
certain advertising agency to pay up for having stolen the idea for
an ad campaign using the phrase The Oxtail English Dictionary
(see `Cannock Chase' in The Meaning of Liff), Adams and Lloyd
were rather put out when it was widely pointed out that the idea
had originated in an essay written by Paul Jennings, called Ware,
Wye and Watford published in the late 1950s.
Douglas suggested that the teacher who gave him the exercise
had probably got the idea from the Jennings book, and sent
Jennings a note of apology.
(Miles Kington in The Times rushed to Adams's and Lloyd's
defence, pointing out the essential difference between the two: that
while Jennings had been primarily interested in the sound and
flavour of the placename [he suggested that `Rickmansworth'- as
in `a small cafe in. . .' - was really the nominal rent paid to the
Lord of the Manor for hay; it sounds right, but isn't particularly
funny], Lloyd-Adams had been far more concerned in amassing
meanings for which there were no words previously in existence,
the actual word or placename they picked being less than
important.)
An additional coincidence (although certain devoted fans
have woven intricate conspiracy theories around it) was its release
at almost exactly the same time as the Monty Python film, The
Meaning of Life. The film's title sequence shows the title, carved,
in classically modest Terry Gilliam fashion, out of huge slabs of
rock; a lightning bolt removes the bottom bar of the E, turning it
into an F - The Meaning of Liff. It was a meaningless
coincidence, discovered by Douglas and Terry Jones slightly
before the release of either of their products, but too late for
anything to be changed. It was a coincidence but if you wish to
concoct conspiracy theories (and what does happen in the fortysecond minute of the film?) then go right ahead.
Although The Meaning of Liff was published in the US in a
different format and with some extra words, it is the least known
of Douglas's books there.
"I did some college readings in America. You would think
that a high concentration of people who knew what I had written
would be in those audiences, yet hardly anybody there had heard
of The Meaning of Liff. I read sections, and they went over well.
People kept asking me where they could find the book. No one
could find it. I think it suffered from nobody knowing what to do
with it. "
`Liff', incidentally, is a town in Scotland. Its meaning? A
book, the contents of which are totally belied by its cover. For
instance, any book the dust jacket of which bears the words,
"This book will change your life! ".
Postscript: Adams and Lloyd, assisted by Stephen Fry, returned to Liff in their
work for The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book, co-edited by
Douglas Adams, and in 1990 an expanded version, The Deeper Meaning of Liff,
was published.
SLATFAT Fish
Four.
Having written one Hitchhiker's book he had been unsatisfied
with, Life, the Universe, and Everything, and having sworn
"never again" on the Hitchhiker's saga, why did Douglas Adams
sign a contract to write the fourth book in the trilogy?
Firstly, he was under a great deal of pressure to write it, both
from his agent and his publishers. On his return from the US, he
explained, "I felt so disoriented being in Los Angeles, and so keen
to be home and just sort of grab hold of things I knew again, it
became very easy to give in to the temptation of sort of reestablishing what I knew I could do, by doing another Hitchhiker's
book.
Secondly, he did have God's Final Message to His Creation;
and since he was never going to tell people what The Ultimate
Question was, he felt that that was something he should reveal.
Thirdly, the advance he was offered topped six hundred
thousand pounds.
He signed the contract.
I asked him about the book in November 1983: "I can tell
you more about the working title than what it's actually going to
be about. The working title is So Long, and Thanks for All the
Fish. It's about something left hanging at the end of the third
book, which is Arthur's quest to find God's final message to His
creation.
"My agent thinks So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish isn't
the right title for the book, since the first three all have `Galaxy' or
`Universe' in the title, so he wants me to call it God's Final Message
to His Creation. I don't know, but I don't think that has the
ironical ring to it, in the way that that most modest of titles Life,
the Universe, and Everything does. Or doesn't. However that
sentence started. Also I do want it to be a quotation from the first
book, as the titles of the other two books were."
While Ed Victor, Douglas's agent, was not too keen on So
Long, and Thanks for All the Fish as a title, everyone else wasespecially Douglas's American publisher (and five-sixths of the
advance money had come from America). At this point Douglas
had a title and a contract. And an idea, but not much of one.
Life, the Universe, and Everything had given Douglas the problem
of trying to force jokes onto a carefully worked-out plot. This time
he would just follow the story wherever it led him. For the first
time, the book was to be released in the UK in a hardback edition
first (rather than a later library and book-club hardback). The
presses were booked. The deadlines were agreed. The final-final
deadlines were agreed. The extensions-beyond-which-one-couldnot-extend were agreed.
Douglas was late.
Although he had made a number of notes on the book, had
toyed with various ideas, including pulling in some of the weirder
stuff from the second radio series, and getting a computer
spreadsheet programme to organise his ideas for him, he had not
written it in his Islington home (incidentally, Life, the Universe,
and Everything is the only Hitchhiker's book Douglas has ever
written at home, as opposed to somewhere else. It has been
suggested that this was because he had only just moved in there,
and it seemed like somewhere else).
He had gone down to the West Country, where earlier books
had been written, but did not write it there.
Which was why the sales kit that went out to Pan Books'
sales representatives in late Summer 1984 began as follows:
In the sales pack were such assorted goodies as badges, and
posters showing birds under glass bowls. Also there was
Douglas's promo piece for the book, a plot description that
began:
Although a fascinating book outline, this is light-years away from
the book that eventually came out.
Before starting the book, Douglas had received a lecture
from Sonn Mehta, Pan s Editorial Director, and Ed Victor, his
agent, on getting the book in on time.
"To begin with, I had been slightly unwilling to write
another Hitchhiker's book. Then I went off to do long
promotional tours, and got very involved in the writing of the
computer game, which took a lot of time. And then I had to write
another version of the screenplay.
"So I kept putting off the book over and over, taking on all
these other things I would do, and then ended up having to write
the book in a terribly short space of time, still not absolutely
certain that I wanted to do it."
In order to make the deadline (remember, the presses had
been booked to print the book, the quantities - even the reprint
times - had been worked out in advance) the book had to be
written in less than three weeks.
The last time a situation like this had occurred was with The
Restaurant at the End of the Universe, when Douglas had wound
up in monastic seclusion, hidden away from the world and doing
nothing but writing for a month.
Once more the job of finding Douglas somewhere to write
fell to Jacqueline Graham of Pan, who recalls, "I'd just got back
from maternity leave and I was asked by Sonny Mehta to find a
suite in a central London hotel - near to Hyde Park, so Douglas
could go jogging - with air conditioning, and a Betamax video
for Sonny. I rang around, and Sonny chose the Berkeley. They
had a very posh suite, with a small bedroom and a big bedroom
- Sonny gave Douglas the small bedroom, as, he said, Douglas
wouldn't be needing it very much."
Sweating over his typewriter, Douglas sat and wrote. He was
allowed out twice a day for exercise. Sonny Mehta sat next door,
watching videos and acting as on-the-spot editor.
At this time, Douglas sent another synopsis of So Long, and
Thanks for All the Fish to Pan and his American publishers.
While this bore rather more relation to the book that eventually
came out than the original synopsis, it concluded:
It may be observed that not all of these characters made it into the
book as it eventually came out.
Douglas explained: "The Leg was something I rather liked
actually, and it came curiously enough, out of the film script. But
as soon as I took it out of context it fell apart, and I couldn't get it
to work elsewhere.
"Do you remember the robot who had the fight with
Marvin? I never had any clear visual description of the battletank,
but it was going to appear in the movie at one point, and I wanted
to give it lots of mechanical legs. The idea was that it was like a
dinosaur - a dinosaur has one subsidiary brain to control its tail,
and I thought this machine would have lots of subsidiary brains
to deal with different bits of it. After the thing smashed itself to
bits, the one thing that would be left with some kind of
independent existence would be one of its legs.
"It was actually one of my favourite new things that I came
up with in the film script. Of course, we don't know what will
happen with the film script, but that bit will almost certainly
never make it into the completed version, not because it's not
good, but because it's completely detachable from the rest and
because the script's too long.
"The Galaxy's Greatest Clam Opener. . . I don't remember
very much about that. It had something to do with a seafood
restaurant in Paris. There was someone I had in mind for the
character: he was the only person who could open this particular
type of clam, which was one of the great gàstronomic experiences.
I'm not sure why it was one of the great gastronomic experiences
but I think it was because whenever you ate it you got a flicker of
memory all the way back to the primeval ooze. It might have had
some plot function, but I can't remember what, and anyway, it
didn't make it beyond the very early version.
"The Ultra-Walrus with the embarrassing past... well, this is
very self-indulgent, I'm afraid. I got the idea after watching Let it
Be and feeling very sorry for this obviously very embarrassed
policeman having to go and make the Beatles stop playing. I mean
knowing this is actually an extraordinary moment: the Beatles are
playing live on a rooftop in London. And this poor policeman's
job was to go and tell them to stop it. I thought that somebody
would be so mortified that they would do anything not to be in
this embarrassing position.
"So I thought of someone who was placed in such an
embarrassing position, one he hated so much, that he would just
want not to be there. The thought goes through his mind, `I
would do anything rather than do what I now have to do',
whereupon someone appears and says to him, `Look, you have
the option to either go and do this thing you don't want to do...
or I can offer you a life on a completely different planet.' So he
opts to go and be this strange sort of walrus creature. And it's a
rather dull life as a walrus, but on the other hand he's perpetually
grateful for the fact that he wasn't in this incredibly embarrassing
position, and had ended up a walrus.
"The reason I made it a walrus, was... well, first of all I
didn't know what the alternative life would be, and then when
Gary Day Ellison, who designed the cover, showed me that
lenticular picture I thought, `I might as well make him a walrus'.
It's because Gary always designs a cover that can clearly not have
any function in relation to the book, and if I still had a chance I'd
always try and work it in somehow. Not that it ever actually
happened that way."
In November the book was released in England and
America. The English cover was all black, with a lenticular
picture of a dinosaur that changed into a walrus (and vice versa)
stuck on the front. (There are no dinosaurs or walruses in So
Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.) The American cover,
marginally more logically, showed some leaping dolphins. (There
are no dolphins in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, but there
are more dolphins than there are walruses or dinosaurs.)
It was in October that the world's most expensive
Hitchhiker's book was sold. At a dinner-party at Douglas's
British inventorial entrepreneur Sir Clive Sinclair spotted a prepublication copy of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish and
asked if he could have it. Douglas refused, pointing out it was the
only copy he had, whereupon Sir Clive whipped out his cheque
book, and offered Douglas $1,000 for the charity of his choice,
providing he could have the book.
Douglas had him make the cheque out to Greenpeace.
However, Douglas's hesitation to give the book away may
have less to do with the fact it was his only copy, and more to do
with the fact that it was not a book with which he was altogether
happy.
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is very different from
the other Hitchhiker's books, and the critical reaction to it was
mixed. For many of the fans it was a disappointment: they
wanted more Zaphod, more Marvin, more space; they wanted
Arthur to make it with Trillian; they wanted to find out how the
Agrajag problem resolved: why Arthur Dent was the most
important being in the universe (and even funnier than the frogs),
they wanted towel jokes and extracts from The Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy. What they got was a love story. So Long, and Thanksfor All
the Fish is no longer science fiction, and, for much of the book, it
is no longer humour (although it is often funny, and has certain
science fiction elements in it). It was not the book the fans were
expecting, and many of them were disappointed.
Many of the mainstream critics, however, preferred it, finding
the gentler pace and the relatively down-to-earth tone easier to
cope with, and coming up with such quotes as "Fish is the best
evidence yet that Adams is not simply a funny sci-fi writer but a
bomb-heaving satirist" (Time); others commented that it read as if
it had been written in a hotel room in two weeks, with such
comments as "a work in which bits and pieces of different
sketches orbit around a non-existent plot" (The Times). So Long,
and Thanks for All the Fish went on to sell as well as any of the
other books, and won the City Limits `best book' award for 1985
(voted on by the readership of the London listings magazine).
Talking to Adams about the book, one finds a mix of
emotions: relief and slight embarrassment that it sold as well as it
did, added to the feeling that he had `used up a life' with the book.
Why weren't the expected characters in the book? "Panly
because they didn't fit, and partly because I didn't want to do
them. It was like a chore - people were saying, `Let's have a
Zaphod bit', and I didn't feel like doing a Zaphod bit!"
This attitude of `I am not going to buckle down to the wishes
of the fans' comes across in the book, to its detriment, most
obviously in Chapter 25, where, having asked, somewhat
rhetorically, whether or not Arthur Dent ever indulges the
pleasures of the senses other than flying and drinking tea,
Douglas comments, `Those who wish to know should read on.
Others may wish to skip on to the last chapter which is a good bit
and has Marvin in it.' It is patronising and unfair. And
undoubtedly would have been cut from a later draft of the
manuscript had there been one. (Occasionally Douglas threatens that at some future date he will rewrite all four
Hitchhiker's books into one massive, self-consistent tome.)
Douglas continued, "You see, I didn't even want to do
Marvin, but then what happened was that I finally had an idea of
something I wanted to do that would have to involve Marvin,
which is the way it should be. I didn't have that with Zaphod, or
I couldn't. But when I needed the extra element for that scene it
looked like a job for Marvin.
"It's very strange, that walking across the desert scene, when
they find the message. I felt very haunted by that when I wrote it
- it's not panicularly funny or anything, but curiously enough I
was very proud of it. I actually felt very sorry for, and sympathetic
with Marvin in that I felt close to the character in a way that
sometimes I hadn't because I was just doing it out of duty.
"But yes, the book is lighter weight than the others. In a
sense I came close to owning up to that on the last page."
It was hard not to see parallels between Arthur Dent's return
from space (which involves telling everybody he's just returned
from California) and Douglas Adams's return from a not
altogether happy year in Los Angeles to the safer environs of
Islington; and while he maintains that Fenchurch is no relation to
Jane, his fiance‚ (Fenchurch being based more on his memories of
adolescent love), he admits there is an element of this in the book.
"It wouldn't be fanciful to say that there is an echo of my
return from LA in there. But I do think that one problem with
the book, and there are many, is that up to that point I had been
writing pure fantasy, which I'd had to do as I'd destroyed the
Earth in the first reel, so to speak. So my job was to make the
fantastical and dreamlike appear to be as real and solid as
possible, that was always the crux of Hitchhiker's.
"Whereas in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish a curious
kind of thing happened.I got back to the everyday and somehow
for the first time it seemed to be unreal and dreamlike. It was
rather in reverse. I think it's largely because I thought I'd get rid
of this problem of not having the Earth there to relate to by just
bringing it back, and I suppose a part of me knew, a part of me
said that you can't really do that. So therefore it wasn't the real
Earth, and therefore it was bound to become unreal and
dreamlike, and that was really a problem with the book.
"Also, you see, the character of Arthur Dent has undergone a
fundamental change by then, because up to that point he has been
our representative in a fantastical world, he has been Everyman,
the person we can relate to, and through whose eyes we have seen
the strange things that have happened. Now suddenly it's been
turned around, and we have a real everyday Earth, and this
character who, far from being our representative, has just spent
the last eight years of his life alternately living in a cave on
prehistoric Earth or being flung around the galaxy.
"So he is no longer someone through whose eyes we can see
things. The whole thing has turned upside down, and I don't
think I had got to grips with that until I was too far committed.
"That's why I am staning afresh now, because I feel all the
lines have gotten rather too tangled."
Whatever happened to the `jumping off a cliff' plot? "It was a
structural idea I came up with which I still think is neat as a
structure, but doesn't work as a book. The book would start with
him leaping off a cliff, with the idea that just before you die your
life flashes before you. There was something he wanted to
remember, and he'd deal with what happened when he got to the
bottom when he got there. So the entire book would be a
flashback which would come from what he thought and he
remembered as he fell down the cliff. I decided after hacking
away at that for a while that it's a short story structure, but not a
novel structure. Some people might argue (and with, I think, a
certain amount of justice) that I didn't achieve a novel structure in
the end, so what was I making a fuss about?
"But I suppose one reason why a lot of that stuff went, why
it never materialised, was I had the feeling during that period of
the whole world looking over my shoulder while I was writing.
Every time someone would write to me and say, `What are you
going to do with this character?' or, `Why don't you do this to
resolve this situation?', then you instantly shy away from it and
think it's no longer yours to control.
"It seemed to me like there was too much to tie up and mop
up in Hitchhiker's, so that trying to write it like that would just
be a continual task of knotting up the loose ends, when in fact it
might be better just to think of something completely different to
do.
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish was to be the last word
on Hitchhiker's. At least in novel form; there were still to be the
computer games, the film, the towel, possibly more television and
more radio - even this book. But in novel form the story had
gone as far as it was going to go.
At least for then.
Douglas said so.
20
A TOWEL, AS EXPLAINED AT LENGTH in the Hitchhiker's Guide to
the Galaxy, is a jolly useful thing.
A towel is also a fairly obvious piece of merchandising.
While the merchandising properties of a number of anifacts
mentioned in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy have obvious
commercial potential - Joo Janta sunglasses, for example, which
turn black when danger threatens, or Disaster Area records, or even
the Guide itself - technology has not yet reached the point where
these things could be manufactured in bulk, nor, indeed, at all.
Not so with towels.
At one point Marks and Spencer (A British chain store whose underwear can be found on two out of three British people.) considered marketing the
towel of the book; however, nothing came of this.
In 1984 Douglas had lunch with Eugene Beer, of Birmingham
publicists Beer-Davies. (Eugene was handling the publicity for the
Hitchhiker's computer game.) During the course of this lunch
Douglas mentioned the abonive Marks and Spencer towel project.
Eugene immediately saw the potential in real, authorised, moneymaking towels, with the relevant page of Hitchhiker's emblazoned
on it. He began marketing them, taking out an advert in Private
Eye, and sending complimentary towels all over the place.
The complimentary towels were intended to cause the writers
who received them to recommend them in print, something which
happened almost without exception.
The towels were originally available in a son of purple and a
son of blue. They were large, strong, good value, and did all the
things that hitchhikery towels are well known for doing, in
addition to which they gave you something to- read on long
journeys, something that even Douglas Adams, in his initial
treatise on towels, failed to think of. The second edition of towels
were available in `Squornshellous Silver' and `Beeblebrox Brown',
and were 60" by 40" (A wide variety of merchandise, such as T-shirts, pens, badges, stickers, etc, is available from ZZ9 Plural 2 Alpha (37 Keen's Road, Croydon, Surrey, CRO 1AH). But no towels.).
21
****************************************************
DEEP THOUGHT DESIGN: THE COMPUTER IS BASICALLY A TALL
WHITE TOWER WHICH TAPERS AS IT GOES
UP. AS IT GOES DOWN IT WIDENS OUT SO
THAT IT ACTUALLY BECOMES THE
FLOOR: YOU QUITE LITERALLY WALK UP
TO IT. TO EITHER SIDE OF IT AND SET
SLIGHTLY FORWARD OF IT ARE TWO
SIMILAR BUT SMALLER TOWERS. SET INTO
THE FRONT OF EACH TOWER IS A TV
SCREEN. THE SCREEN ON THE MAIN
TOWER HAS A PICTURE OF A MOUTH.
WHEN DEEP THOUGHT TALKS, THE
MOUTH MOVES IN SYNCH. ONE OF THE
OTHER SCREENS SHOWS A SINGLE EYE,
AND THE THIRD SCREEN SHOWS A SIDE
VIEW OF A SINGLE EAR. EACH EYE AND
EAR AND MOUTH SHOULD BE AS
ANONYMOUS AS POSSIBLE, BUT IT
SHOULD BE APPARENT THAT THEY ARE
NOT FROM THE SAME PERSON.
- Suggested design (first version) for Deep
Thought, from TV script, Episode Four.
***********************************************************
********************************************************
NEW DEEP THOUGHT DESIGN:
DEEP THOUGHT IS A HUGE EDIFICE, AS
HUGE AS SET AND BUDGET LIMITATIONS
WILL ALLOW. IT IS BRILLIANT GOLD. IT IS
CLEARLY A COMPUTER, BUT IT BEARS AN
UNCANNY RESEMBLANCE TO A HUGE
FAT BUDDHA. THE FACT THAT IT DOES SO
MUST LOOK AWESOME AND IMPRESSIVE.
- Deep Thought design, (second version),
from TV script, Episode Four.
*****************************************************
Of a pub cheese sandwich...
"The barman gives you a cheese sandwich. The bread is like the
stuff that stereos come packed in, the cheese would be great for
rubbing out spelling mistakes, and margarine and pickle have
combined to produce something that shouldn't be, but is,
turquoise. Since it is clearly unfit for human consumption you
are grateful to be charged only a pound for it."
Later in the game, when one obtains a copy of the Guide, it can
be consulted on a number of subjects. Fluff, for example...
"Fluff is interesting stuff: a deadly poison on Bodega Minor, the
diet staple of Frazelon V, the unit of currency on the moons of
the Blurfoid System, and the major crop of the laundry supplies
planet, Blastus 111. One ancient legend claims that four pieces
of fluff lie scattered around the Galaxy: each forming one
quarter of the seedling of a tree with amazing properties, the
sole survivor of the tropical planet Fuzzbol (Footnote 8). The
ultimate source of fluff is still a mystery, with the scientific
community divided between the Big Lint Bang theory and the
White Lint Hole theory." (Footnote 8, should you care to
check, informs you that "it's not much of a legend really.)"
THE GAME ITSELF:It is difficult to say too much about the computer game without
giving information away that could spoil it for somebody playing
it. Essentially, it is based on the events in the first two-thirds of
the book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. One starts out as
Arthur Dent, in bed one morning in Tiverton in Devon, with an
awful hangover. Initial problems include how to pick something
up without it slipping through your fingers and how not to be
killed when a large yellow bulldozer knocks down your house.
Things remain fairly faithful to the book until you reach the
Heart of Gold, at which point Ford, Zaphod and Trillian go off
to have a sauna and you are left to your own devices in a ship full
of uncooperative GPP machines. After that things get very
bizarre indeed: events are experienced from a multitude of
viewpoints; problems to be solved occur in places as disparate as
Damogran, a party in Islington, and the interior of a whale.
To get you through the game are your copy of The
Hitchhiker's Guide, your Sub-Etha Sensomatic Thumb, and your
towel - not to mention your native wit, luck, and a sense of
humour. And a thing your aunt gave you that you don't know
what it is.
The game is addictive: fiendishly hard, yet impossible to
leave alone until every last problem is solved, which can only be
done by paying attention to every piece of information that
comes your way, and often by thinking extremely laterally. The
game can be played by novices, who might in some ways have
less difficulty than experienced computer gamers, who would not
necessarily find it easy to tune in to the game's peculiar mind-set.
It is easy to see why Douglas Adams found this the most
enjoyable part of Hitchhiker's; almost all aspects of it, from the
adventure, to the Guide entries, to the footnotes, even to the
Invisiclues Hints book, display a relaxed attitude missing from
the books and radio series. Adams has a tendency to have ideas
that don't always fit into the framework of what he is doing at the
time. The enjoyable thing about the computer game is that the
most bizarre ideas can be incorporated into it with ease. Also
Adams's love of problem-solving (crosswords and such) is given
full rein.
The weakest part of the game is the opening section of the
packaging and manual: an eight-page advertisement for the Guide
("Yes! The Universe Can Be Yours For Less Than 30 Altairian
Dollars Per Day!") which comes across as sophomoric - more
like Mad magazine than Douglas Adams.
The game, however, is a major achievement, one that even
the least computer literate Hitchhiker's fan should enjoy.
22
*********************************************************
"I'M TERRIBLY GRATEFUL for the fans - apart from anything else
they provide my bread and butter. I'm obviously delighted there
are so many people who enjoy this stuff. But I try to keep a little
bit of distance because I believe the most dangerous thing a
person can do is believe their own publicity. I know, from people
I look up to and admire - for instance, John Cleese: it took me a
long time to be able to perceive him as an ordinary human being,
and I know how very very easy it is to look at somebody who is
actually a perfectly normal human being, who happens to have a
particular talent, an ability or facility that puts them into the
limelight, to see them as being some sort of very elevated and
extraordinary person, which they're not. I think you do yourself
a favour if you try not to expose yourself too much to people
who are going to tell you you are God's gift to the human race,
which you're not. The media present you as being some kind of
superhuman, and you aren't, so you just have to keep all that at
arm's length.
"It's rather curious when I discover that a phrase of mine has
entered the language. I mean, one never seriously thinks that
what one gets up to at home has much effect on anything else,
and though you see the bestseller lists, and get letters and royalty
statements it doesn't impinge on me that it has that kind of effect
on other people. I don't want to believe that it does.
"People like me don't make the gossip pages because they
don't know our faces. I get the advantages of being famous with
none of the disadvantages. It's startling when somebody does
recognise me -I feel slightly vulnerable when it occurs. I can
understand why writers take a pseudonym. It's strange having an
existence in other people's minds which has little to do with you.
It's not the same me they wrote about on my school reports."
- Douglas Adams on fame,1985.
*****************************************************
The answer to `The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and
Everything is not in fact 42, but is stored in the reproductive cells of
all life forms and this answer is found via 42. To explain better all,
or most, cells reprodure by splitting in two to form two cells.
Thus, one cell becomes two, two becomes four... and so on.
It follows that The Answer must, therefore be some power of two.
Deep Thought came up with the number 42, and this is indeed the
power to which 2 must be raised to find this answer....
Q What was the Dire Straits songfrom `So Long, and Thanks
for All the Fish'?
A The Dire Straits song is `Tunnel of Love' and it's on the
Making Movies album.
Q What was the Question of `Life, the Universe, and
Everything '?
A The actual question for which Arthur Dent has been
seeking has now been revealed to me. It is this:
To a thirteen-year-old young novelist, who was having great
difficulty thinking up names for characters:
A If you are having trouble in thinking up character names
you are probably using the wrong kind of coffee. Have you
tried an Italian blend?
Q What is the point of `Dr Who'?
A The whole point of Dr Who is that, if you take the second
letter of each of the 59th words of all the episodes over the
last twenty years of broadcast and run them together
backwards, the original location of the lost city of Atlantis is
revealed. I hope this answers your question.
To someone enquiring where Arthur got the copy of The
Hitchhiker s Guide to the Galaxy in So Long, and Thanks for
All the Fish, and in which pub in Taunton Fenchurch and
Arthur met:
A Although copies of the actual guide have never been
published on Earth, copies of it are freely (or rather,
expensively) available throughout the Galaxy. Arthur
acquired another one for himself on his journey back to
Earth - in other words, between the end of Life, the
Universe, and Everything and So Long, and Thanks for All
the Fish. Although I set the pub scene in Taunton, the pub I
had in mind was in fact one in Gillingham in Dorset, the
name of which (wisely) I forget.
Often he receives numbered questions, which often get numbered
answers:
Q:
1) Why did you decide to start writing?
2) What aspects of science fiction are you `ripping off'?
3) What experiences do you feel affected your attitudes and
values ?
4) Can your feelings be linked with those of any of the
characters in your boorFs?
S) What is your background?
6) Why do you write science fiction rather than normal
fiction ?
7) Do you enjoy writing?
e) What do you think is your `style' of writing?
Q:
1) How long did it take you to write `Life, the Universe, and
Everything'?
2) Are any of the characters designed from your own
personality?
3) Have you ever considered doing a comic book ?
4) Who is your favourite character in the trilogy?
5) Where did you get the inspiration to do your books?
Q:
1) Why did you start to write?
2) Why do you write science fiction ?
3) Where do you get your ideas from?
Q:
1) How do you come up with those names?
2) What gave you the idea to write the books?
3) Why this subject?
4) When did you decide to become an author and why?
5) Did you like the results of the books?
6) Why did you put Ford and Arthur on Ancient Earth?
7) How long did it take to write the books?
And finally, a letter that Douglas scrawled answers in on, but
which was never posted, since the correspondent had omitted his
name and address...
1) Do you parallel yourself on any of the main characters?
How?
No.
2) How did working with the Monty Python Troupe affect
your work?
I didn't. I knew them but did not work with them.
3) How often have you been railroaded or forced into doing
something you just didn 't want to do (as Arthur Dent in `Life,
the Universe, and Everything')?
37 times.
4) Do you believe in fate, and do you try to put this idea
across in your work?
No.
5) Could you include a short autobiography, including
anything tbat you consider contributing to your work ?
Born 1952. Haven't died yet.
6) What is your favourite planet?
Earth. It's the only one I know.
7) Did you do much research before doing the writing?
None.
8) Have you studied history in depth ?
Semi-depth.
9) What is your main message in `Life, the Universe, and
Everything'?
No message. If I'd wanted to write a message I'd have written
a message. I wrote a book.
10) Have you ever had experiences similar to that your
characters have?
No.
11 ) Have you ever been hounded by the Galactic police for
the whereabouts of one Zaphod Beeblebrox?
No. They are fictional characters.
... Since I have such an in-depth knowledge of your work I
feel I am worthy of meeting you and chatting to you about our
dear friends Trill, Zaphod, and not forgetting miserable Marvin.
Please write and let me know when and where you would like to
arrange a meeting...
(M.D. London)
Dear Mr Adams,
Rest easy - I'm not a Beverly Hills real estate agent. If
you`re still unmarried and have no children and you're interested
in girls, pick up the phone next time you're in New York City, dial
(xxxxx) and ask for Marion. I would love to meet the man behind
that silly grin. References furnished on request.
The young lady in question said she was five feet eight, nine
stone six, a brunette with multicoloured eyes, and described
herself as `discreet, adventurous, agile, willing to do anything
provided it doesn't do me permanent physical damage and I've a
good phone manner.' Douglas did not reply.
Then there was the fan letter from an American writer,
hopefully working on a film script, who explained: It's a lot of
work, but I break the monotony getting laid in the back bars by
pretending to be you. Thanks.
Dear Mr Adams,
Thank you for no longer writing about 2aphod Beeblebrox,
because I grew to feel a keen sense of identification with him from
acquiring two heads, a fleet, and experiencing the Flying City in
the Pyramids, your HHGG Corporation Building. At least I
deduce it was because the motto was `Don't Panic' (See Daniel
4:34 because at that very hour the planets were in conjunction).
This is followed by a lengthy ramble through the Bible, and
the works of Adams, Castenada and Moorcock, which proves
that 42 is really 666, the number of the beast, and concludes...
Well, thanks for all the fish. A word from you might help
matters with my girlfriend who doesn't seem to understand I
actually lived through your books: If you don 't understand this
then I'll just give up (`The Gods don't dwell amongst men' Daniel
2:11)...
Dear Douglas Adams,
The Answer is not 42; it is `NAM-MYOTO-RENGE-KYO'
This is the law of life as propounded by Nichiren Derishonin in
about 1255 AD...
**********************************************************
"A number of people have said that Hitchhiker's belongs to the
same genre as Pilgrim's Progress.
"That's not to compare the two, just to point out that there is
a genre with a long history, which is that of the innocent abroad
in a fantastical world.
"A graduate student sent me a long paper on one book that
we know for sure that John Bunyan (author of Pilgrim's Progress)
actually read. It's called The Plain Man's Path to Heaven, written
by an English Puritan writer called Arthur Dent. He assumed
that I was áware of this and was having some extraordinary
academic joke.
"Once you've decided to find parallels you can find them all
the time: you can add up numbers, you can compare images...
you can pick up any two books and if you wished to prove they
were parallel, you could do it. You could pick up the Bible and
the telephone directory, and you could prove that each has a
direct relationship to the other."
- Douglas Adams.
****************************************************
Dear Mr Adams,
You're weird. Or at least your writing is weird. That's okay
by me. I'm a little weird myself. If you are really one of those
terribly dull people who just write weird please keep it a secret, I
hate being disillusioned. . .
Dirk Gently and Time for Tea
"I feel written out in Hitchhiker's and I don't feel I have
anything more to say in that particular medium. There are other
things I want to do. I've been thinking of writing in the
horror/mystery/occult area. Really the whole thing is to find a
whole new set of characters and a new environment - it isn't just
that it's new, but that it's an environment and a set of characters
that I, now at age 33, thought up, rather than what I came up with
when I was 25. There's an awful lot of things I want to do, and
the major thing, the core, is going to have to be writing books."
- Douglas Adams, October 1985.
One morning in November 1985, Douglas Adams and his agent,
Ed Victor, sat in a hotel room in which a number of phone lines
had been set up, and waited for the phones to ring. By the end of
the working day one lucky publisher had come away with the
rights to Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, and its sequel,
and Douglas was over two million dollars richer than he had been
that morning. The first book was to be delivered in a year's time
and would be published in April 1987.
And after that?
"Well, the moment you always feel like writing a book is
when you've just finished one, so now I've actually got a two-book
deal, what I'd like to do is write this book, then immediately write
the second book, and see if I can get them both done in a year. At
the moment, the second book will be a Dirk Gently book as well
- assuming the first one works."
From the original outline of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective
Agency, it was obviously a detective novel, an occult-ghost story,
a dissertation on quantum physics, and a great deal of fun. As has
already been commented on, certain characters and situations
from Shada and City of Death recur.
"One of my objectives with this book is, although it is going
to be a comedy, it is not, as Hitchhiker's was, going to be
primarily a comedy, because with Hitchhiker's everything would
have to bow and bend to the jokes, and often you would have to
abandon bits of plot or turn them on their heads, or do real
violence to a plot in order to get the joke to be funny.
"What I want to do with this, and am in the process of
getting, is a tightly organised plot with a lot of ideas packed in it,
and then write by that plot and allow it to be funny when it
wants to be, but not force it to be funny, which was the problem
with Hitchhiker's. Once that's straight, then all sorts of things
become naturally funny, but there's never any sense of... well,
it's like when you used to have to write essays at school you
would always want to put in jokes, but the moment you've got to
write a sketch you can't think of anything funny to save your life.
So I'm setting this up in a different way this time.
"It will be apparent when you read it that being funny is an
imponant pan of it, but it's just not the prime mover any more."
In the UK, the bidding saw the book go to Heinemann, with
Pan as the paperback house, something that Douglas saw as
solving a problem he had faced hitheno.
"The problem was that I've always gone into paperback first,
and even with So Long, and Thanks... which went into
hardback first, it was still from a paperback house.
"But there's a different way that paperback houses are geared
to doing things than hardbacks, because at a paperback house the
schedule is so much tighter, because they are going to sell so
many more copies of the book. And because everything a
paperback house does is almost always after the hardback
publication of the book, there's no need to build flexibility into
the system.
"Hardback publishers on the other hand are completely
geared to the fact that writers are always late and always difficult.
In the past, every time I hit a problem (which was pretty
frequently) there was no time to stop and get it right. It began to
seem absurd to me that here I was, an author of incredibly
popular books, so what I wrote was imponant not only to me but
to a very large public, and I didn't have a chance to get it right,
and this seemed absolutely crazy. The more successful you
become the less chance there is of getting the stuff you are writing
to work properly.
"Now I want to make it clear that I'm not being rude about
Pan, who did a wonderful job in promoting and marketing and
selling an enormous number of copies, but it is just not in the
nature of a paperback house to deal with the problems of actual
authorship. That's not what they are geared up to do. So now that
I have a hardback publisher I think this is going to malie a huge
difference to the way things go from now on."