The Outsider Read Free Page A

liked the outline and would like to see the rest. At this time, I was working during the evenings in a coffee bar in the Haymarket, so that I could spend my days writing in the British Museum. In the Autumn I sent him the completed manuscript and he accepted it. That Winter, I gave up work for a few weeks—for the first time since I ’ d left school at 16—and lived on the £75 advance that Gollancz gave me. Somehow, I had no doubt that the book would be a success. I think I had too little doubt about the importance of what I had to say to feel misgivings. Gollancz, understandably, had no such confidence; he finally decided to take the risk of printing five thousand copies.
    Publication day was set for Monday, May 26, 1956. Even before this, I was beginning to smell the breath of fame, and finding it exciting. Edith Sitwell, the poetess who had ‘ discovered ’ Dylan Thomas, had read the book in proof, and told Gollancz she thought I was going to be ‘ a truly great writer ’ . A journalist on one of the London evening newspapers asked to interview me; I spent an evening at his flat talking into his tape recorder—which struck me as a fabulous device—and listening to a record of the latest hit show, My Fair Lady. Gollancz told me he had been promised a review in the Evening News on the Saturday before publication. My girlfriend, Joy, was spending the weekend with me—I was now living in a room in Notting Hill Gate—and we bought the paper as soon as it appeared; but there seemed to be no review. I went to bed that night oddly depressed—my bicycle had been stolen a few hours before, and it seemed a bad omen. The next morning, we woke up early a nd rushed to the corner of West bourne Grove to buy the two ‘ posh ’ Sunday papers. Both of them had devoted their lead review to The Outsider, and both were full of praise. When we got back to my room, someone told us that there had been a review in the previous evening ’ s newspaper; we looked again, and found a headline: ‘ He ’ s a major writer—and he ’ s only 24 ’ .
    Before that day was out, I had no doubt that I was famous, whatever that meant. I had no telephone—naturally—but our neighbours in the basement had one, and it began to ring at about nine o ’ clock that morning—my editor ringing me up to congratulate me, and to ask my permission to give the telephone number to the press. Within a couple of hours I had agreed to be interviewed by half a dozen newspapers, and to appear on radio and television. Moreover, a playwright named John Osborne had achieved success on the same day; his play Look Back in Anger had been produced at the Royal Court a few days earlier, and reviews by Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson launched him to fame as the first ‘ Angry Young Man\ (The actual phrase was invented by J. B. Priestley, who wrote an article about the two of us under that title in The New Statesman the following week.) In fact, Osborne and I had only one thing in common—that both of us had been turned into ‘ outsiders ’ by our working-class backgrounds, and the suspicion that we would spend the rest of our lives stuck in dreary obscurity. But the fact that we appeared on the literary scene at the same time somehow doubled the furore.
    It was a strange experience. On the 24th of May, 1956, I had been totally unknown. I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that ‘ the world ’ would decline to recognize them. The ‘ famous ’ seemed to be a small and very exclusive club, and the chances of getting into it were about equal to those of winning the football pools. And then, suddenly, on the 25th, I had apparently been elected without opposition, and the pundits of the Sunday newspapers were assuring the public that I was at least as important as Sartre and Camus, a real British home-grown existentialist. And when the press got hold of the story about sleeping on Hampstead Heath, I became notorious as well as