I was an unconfident and late-arriving first novelist. Metroland was published when I was 34, and I’d been working on it for seven or eight years. I’d put it in a drawer for long periods, shown it to friends with mixed response, worried about it, liked it, despised it. Some first novelists behave as if the world has been waiting to hear from them, and occasionally this is the case: the world does want to hear this new story, told by this new voice, in this new manner. I had no such self-belief. Besides, I’d been reading serious fiction for nearly 20 years: what made me think I could add anything to the literary world’s store of wisdom, human insight and technical craft? Neither did I feel that this was some necessary, if meagre, first step for me: learn with and from my first novel, grow in confidence, then “become a novelist”. I was entirely lacking in ideas for future books; indeed, perhaps I wanted to “be a novelist” mainly in the sense of “having published a single novel”.
While I was drafting and redrafting Metroland, I showed it to the only two writer friends I had. Both were poets, which might have been a mistake. One was substantially evasive, while telling a mutual friend that I should suppress the book now, as otherwise I’d “regret it” later. The other told me I ought to reread Great Expectations and “put in a wanking scene”. I didn’t confess that I could hardly reread Great Expectations as I hadn’t ever read it in the first place; nor did I put in a wanking scene. So at least I had a certain stubbornness, which is a necessary part of being a writer.
I had a theoretical agent; but the only contract she had so far drawn up – for a new edition of Holman Hunt’s Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, to be co-edited by me and the “wanking” poet – had petered out as a project almost immediately. In the same way, I had a theoretical publisher; but again, this hardly encouraged me. Five years previously, I had entered a ghost-story competition organised by the Times; the dozen best entries were put into an anthology, and the contributors’ contracts demanded that any “subsequent full-length work” must be submitted to Messrs Jonathan Cape (which felt more like blackmail than “having a publisher”). As it happened, one of the other dozen participants was making her modest fictional debut in the same anthology:Penelope Fitzgerald. But I didn’t know – nor would I or anyone else have guessed from her story – that she would later become the best British novelist of her generation.
I “finished” – a posh way of saying “abandoned through fatigue” – the novel and sent it in to Jonathan Cape. I learned subsequently that both publishers’ readers who examined it had turned it down. But – and this was my stroke of luck – Liz Calder, then an editor at Gollancz, but on her way to Cape, called in the typescript and overrode the readers’ advice. She asked me for a substantial revision of the novel’s third part. I did this, feeling weary of the whole project. She told me she was now happy with the rejigged Part 3, but might I perhaps have a further look at Part 2? Again, stubbornness kicked in. I declared myself content with Part 2; but what I really meant was that I couldn’t face doing any more work on the novel. (This is one of the things you slowly learn as a writer: how long a book will stay alive in your head, and therefore remain malleable.) Still, I had a contract, and a promised advance of £750.
In my 20s, I had written a full-length non-fiction book: a literary guide to Oxford. I had sold it to a small press, which announced its forthcoming publication at six-monthly intervals over a period of about three years. At which point I sent them a letter from the Department of Empty Threats: either publish, or return the typescript. The typescript had come back almost before the threat had been posted. So what would have happened if Liz Calder had turned down Metroland (well, we wouldn’t have had a long friendship, for a start) – and then other publishers had done so, too? Mid-30s, two completed books, both deemed unpublishable? I had a parallel career as a journalist and might well have decided that the long form, and hard covers, were not for me. Most literary careers depend on three things: talent, hard work – and luck. I had mine at just the right moment (though I suppose that is the definition of luck: something that comes along at just the right moment).
Even so, with the book about to be published, I was prepared for failure. I knew the weaknesses of my own novel (we always do). And so, self-protectively, I decided to write in advance the most extravagantly damning review Metroland might possibly receive. It was by “Mack the Knife” and “appeared” in the Daily Sniveller. It began:
Once upon a time there was a creature called the sensitive young man. Often he was awarded capital letters, thus: the Sensitive Young Man. He flourished at the time, in the shadow, and sometimes tucked into the shoulder, of Oscar Wilde. He wrote novels not because he had anything to say, but because he wanted to be a novelist. Being a novelist was, he thought, a fine thing.
Mack the Knife then went to work on the book, on its unoriginality, its disregard of modernism, its blandness. Patronisingly, he admitted that Barnes “does not write inelegantly” and “occasionally turns a sprightly phrase”, while pointing out that “A smattering of French cannot conceal the poverty of the author’s imagination, and the novel’s brevity is, alas, no guarantee against tedium”. He concluded:
In the old days, the Sensitive Young Man, after producing his novel, would slide back into the obscurity of book-reviewing and hock-and-seltzer; he would in middle age be much taken with writing letters to the newspapers; and in old age, chairbound in his club, he would reveal himself to be the unremitting philistine which his earlier manifestation had sought to conceal. We must wish Mr Barnes well as he sets off on this inevitable journey.
My “plan” was that if any reviewer identified all the faults that Mack had, I would give up writing fiction. But perhaps another part of my luck was that, back in 1980, there still existed a generous tradition that first novels (and first novelists) should be treated with indulgence. And so Metroland escaped too much censure, and even went into paperback. Its publication also released some psycho-literary trigger in me: to my surprise, ideas for subsequent novels began to arrive rather quickly. It seemed I wasn’t going to be a one-novel novelist after all. Though I was still thin-skinned and wary of being judged, so continued the tradition of the advance self-review with my second novel, Before She Met Me (“When Mr Barnes isn’t being sensitive, he is being vulgar, seemingly obsessed on this occasion with lower-bowel noises; he seems unable to appreciate that most of life takes place in the middle ground between ‘being sensitive’ and ‘farting’”). After this, I gave up on the masochism.
I haven’t ever reread Metroland, but I am fond of the book. First, because it existed, and still exists; it started me off, and it gave me confidence. Secondly, because I think I succeeded in what I was trying to do: take the traditional Bildungsroman a stage further, ending not with the young protagonist gazing Balzacianly down on the city where he is to seek and perhaps make his fortune, but continuing on until a kind of defeat (if an ambiguous one) is reached. And thirdly, Metroland taught me a little about readers. In 1981 I was travelling with my wife in China; our tour party included a German woman a generation or so above me, who had been brought up in a small village in the Black Forest. She had read Metroland (in English, of course) and told me that growing up had been “exactly like that” for her, too. I was astonished, and delighted. I had known, as a reader, that if a book contained enough truth, it would travel through time and space and language, to find unexpected readers. But this was the first time I experienced the process from the opposite direction.
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