Diana McCaulay

Last Saturday, March 26th, 2011, I read at the Book Industry of Jamaica’s book festival in Kingston. The reading tent was by no means full. The microphone was more or less a decoration. It was one year to the day since Dog-Heart was launched at Bookophilia.

So I’ve been thinking about all this year has meant. I looked back at all my blogs on the subject, my sometimes euphoric, but more often angst-ridden e-mails to friends, my scrapbook. I smiled at the tracking of the books across the Atlantic, the seizing by customs, sighed at the moment when I first held the book in my own hands. Remembered the launch itself – I will never again launch a first book – the moments of wondering if anyone would show up, if it would rain, the little still life Andrea Dempster of Bookophilia and I made for the table display. And then my friends walked in wearing Dog-Heart T-shirts! And the books sold out!

Looking back, I wondered if the very beginning had been the high point…

Well, no. But it is strange how we move our own goalposts, because here’s what I wrote in February 2010: “Do I dream of fame and fortune? Well, sometimes. Hardly ever fortune, it must be said, but sometimes of fame, however that might be defined. But mostly what I dream of, as I picture my books in their cardboard boxes, is that one day I will see someone reading a copy, maybe they'll be on a plane, maybe on a park bench, maybe in a library, coffee shop, bookshop - and I will see them turning the pages, and when they come to the end, they will close the book and stare off into the distance, like I do when a book has claimed me, unwilling to let the book go, and I will know they were captured and they were moved by my words. These are big dreams, I know…”

Apart from my niece, I haven’t actually seen anyone reading my book, far less staring off into space afterwards. Never seen anyone buying it, actually – except at readings. I still haunt foreign bookstores, hoping to see Dog-Heart on the shelves, even way in the back, where they hardly have lights. I go up to the information desk and ask if they have my book, knowing the answer, trying to take comfort in the invariable response that no, they don’t, but they can order it for me. I long ago stopped checking the Amazon rankings. I still do book fairying in Jamaica – that is to say, I visit places where books are sold and check that Dog-Heart is available, sometimes turning it face out, moving it to eye level, making oh so gentle calls to the distributor if it isn’t there. I’m on long-lost-friend terms with the staff of the bookstore at Norman Manley airport – they greet me with big smiles, yeh man, we have your book, don’t worry.

I also know that Dog-Heart has sold, at least here. I have received many, many e-mails from those who have read it. I don’t know the numbers, because the first year has only just elapsed and my first real royalty cheque is to come. But I do know I am not one of those publishing sensations, those literary darlings, the ones negotiating six figure advances and winning prizes, the ones who beat the lottery-type odds. People like me are called mid-list authors – apparently there is no bottom-list, at least not that anyone will admit. Perhaps Dog-Heart is too literary to be popular but not literary enough for critical approval.

But I read at Calabash last year, right after over 70 Jamaicans died in a near-war in West Kingston – and now Calabash has ended. I have talked to many book groups, both here and overseas, sometimes on Skype. And I sat in the audience at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies 12th Annual Conference in Kingstonand heard my friend Esther Figueroa deliver a paper drawing parallels between Dog-Heart and Jamaica Kincaid’s Mr. Potter.   Whoy, is all I can say. 

I’ve watched the story behind the story I made up play out in the front pages of our newspapers. I believe fiction always has its roots in reality, even science fiction, the meteors and space ships are just so much packaging, human nature being the fodder, the raw material, the catalyst of fiction. So I watched and mourned the arrest of a child I had known and loved, now a man, Jamaica’s most wanted, wearing only his briefs, sitting handcuffed on the floor.

I wrote another novel during the years Dog-Heart was in rejection mode, and when Dog-Heart was finally a Real Book, I found I hardly remembered my first book – it was like something I had read years ago, or studied for a test. Today, the new book, Huracan, was rejected for the fifth time. And I am wondering if I have the stamina for this particular journey, the thick skin, the faith in my own talents, the ego. It takes ego to imagine that I know something worth knowing, worth writing, worth saying. Should anyone, I wonder, have such an ego?

So what to make of it all? Writing books reminds me of the years when my son was a baby and I felt the rewards of that first smile, that gurgle of pleasure at the sight of my face, were disproportionate to the efforts, to the sleepless nights, the worry, the hours spent in doctor’s waiting rooms. The rewards of motherhood were all in the future and when my son was young, I feared they would never come. So it is with writing – the rewards puny in comparison to the work expended and long deferred – perhaps permanently deferred.

I ask myself what I expected. Colin Channer tells a story of complaining about the size of the advance for his first novel. His agent (damn, he has an agent!) took him to one of the chain bookstores and showed him how many books he would have to sell to earn a six figure advance. When you see that many books in one place, you know you will never have that many readers. But still, you hope for it. You hope that your book will be like Captain Corelli’s Mandolin which broke records simply because ordinary people loved it and told their friends about it. You still root around in the back of bookshops – I can tell you exactly where Dog-Heart would be on a shelf , were it ever to make itself there – right beside Cormac McCarthy’s novels.

Things I have realized in my book year – that the best thing I could do for my books would be to migrate. How hard this is to accept, that it really is not possible to promote a book from the place where the book is set; not if it’s set in the Caribbean.

That we are living through a cataclysm in publishing as profound as the one wrought by the printing press. I own the electronic rights and Dog-Heart is available on Kindle and I-Pad, and when a person here and there downloads a copy, the money appears in my bank account within weeks– there is no wait for a year for the print book royalty statement.

That literary prizes are corrosive – yes, potentially game changing – but I hated the way being entered made me feel, the anxiety and hope and despair that attended the announcement of the long list, the envy I experienced for other authors who won when I did not, the tendency to disparage their work, to say, oh it’s who they knew. Or – haven’t they won enough?

As I sit here thinking about art and writing and sacrifice, my Twitter account tells me in 140 characters that the efforts to contain the nuclear reactor in Japan have failed and the radiation is in the sea, where it is deemed to be “safe” because of the dilution effect although there are murmurings about the effect on sea life. The people of Japan still live in a devastated land, their shattered buildings iced with a thin coating of snow, their faces masked, their shoulders hunched against the cold. The radiation circles the globe. And the cobra that escaped from the Bronx zoo has more than 10,000 followers on Twitter. So I ask myself about the self indulgence of art, about what constitutes artistic success, about the privilege of a life that can afford to sit at a computer and turn out words, about the worth of the life of an observer, a storyteller, a commentator – do we need such people, such endeavours? Surely we do, if only to point out the farce of a tweeting snake making news during the same weeks of a nuclear disaster?

And this is what I come to, a simple thing  – I’m glad I wrote a novel and I’m glad I held it in my hands and I’m glad it’s out there in the world.

(Will I have the fortitude to bring another to print? Stay tuned..