The perils of fame

I have always been aware of the perils of fame. Years ago, while I was waiting for my first novel to be published I offered the editor of the newspaper where I worked an article on this notable event. The danger to a young writer of instant success, the corruption of money, the pain of fame. He declined. Funny business, literature, he said. So it turned out to be. The event passed unnoticed. Five kindly lines in the Observer for The Money Tree did not impress my publisher, Hamish Hamilton (Jamie to his friends, Mr Hamilton to me).
However, the threat of fame did not go away. For my second novel, Point of Stress, Mr Hamilton primed some of his better known writers who also reviewed books that he expected some enthusiasm for this promising recruit to their trade. They did not fail him. It has the cleansing sanity of Candide and of the the best of Bernard Shaw, wrote John Raymond, then a critic of some eminence, sadly dead now. One is left in better heart for reading it, he insisted. Voltaire, Bernard Shaw? I turned the pages of Point of Stress with new admiration, smiling at the jokes, Voltarian ones presumably, although I had not read him. I awaited the summons, the four-column photograph, the agonising questions from the Paris Review, the need to preserve my privacy. But I was spared. The next two novels gave me no anxiety. No one much liked them except my editor at Chatto & Windus, Dennis Enright. I have had several more novels published, all well received, as they say; succes d'estime is the polite and meaningless phrase. This year I have another novel published, Beyond Reason (Solidus), and Profile Books has published The Economist Book of Obituaries, part of which I wrote. Good reads both, but best not spread it around.