The One Eyed Almanac

Just after Bethnal Green the railway line takes a sharp turn before making its final approach into Liverpool Street and it was around about here that I experienced my One Eyed Almanac eureka moment sometime in 2001.  I was on my way to work and deep in the midst of Martin Chuzzlewit when the phrase leapt out at me.

“'You will take care, my dear Martin,' said Mr Pecksniff, resuming his former cheerfulness, 'that the house does not run away in our absence. We leave you in charge of everything. There is no mystery; all is free and open. Unlike the young man in the Eastern tale--who is described as a one-eyed almanac, if I am not mistaken, Mr Pinch?--' 

I’d been tentatively scratching away at an idea for a novel for a few months, sketching out plot and scenes and characters in the evenings, and in various odd moments in cafes and on buses and trains, but thus far it was still a jumble, and a title-less one at that.  Now, all of sudden, I knew that I had my title, something that I could refer to the thing as, if only to myself at this stage, a title that was imprecise enough to mean anything that I wanted it to mean.

The subsequent novel had an over-prolonged gestation as I worked out the problems of what the hell it was that I wanted to do with it.  For over a year, during which I moved twice, it was a first person narrative, written under the boozy influence of Bukowski.

I’ve always liked Bukowski since I first read him, having soon got over the odious Mickey Rourke in the film Barfly, and, although I wish the Bukowski Industry would give over trying to extract every last morsel from his poems and letters, and empty bottles and belches and farts, I still get a good laugh out of reading his Henry Chinaski books – Factotum, Post Office, Women, Hollywood.  Having worked for a number of years in a factory, I appreciated someone who could write vividly and humorously and, yes, humanely, about that life of physical drudgery.  This was where the “I” came from in the first stab at the One Eyed Almanac.

As with most tyro novelists, I think, my subject matter was largely embellished auto-biography.
 

I wish now that I’d had a bit better idea of what I wanted to do with myself when I was eighteen but, since I hadn’t, I don’t regret for a minute not going off to university then.  I did get as far as applying, to “do” Politics at various London polytechnics (now pseudo-universities) but soon gave up on the idea in favour of idling.  It was all for the best, probably, as I’m sure that I would’ve behaved badly and devoted much more time to the student lifestyle than to actual studying.  By the time that I did go off to university, nearly a decade later, I’d had enough experience of being a horny-handed son of toil, and of a certain amount of sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, to fully appreciate the wonderful opportunity to learn, and to work hard at it without being distracted in the, quite natural, way that those fresh from the apron strings usually are.

I don’t know about now, as I haven’t signed-on for over twenty years, but in 1986 it was the easiest thing in the world to do and there were (nearly) no questions asked.  I filled in a form – a B1 – and after that the giros started dropping through the letterbox every fortnight.  I arranged to rent with friends and became quickly acquainted with the intricacies of manipulating housing benefit to gain another tenner a week.

 

Life was both simple and exciting.  It was a time of innocence and desperate cool. Of first love and throwing up on cider.  Of grubbing together enough money to buy a ‘teenth of Leb from a biker and of getting to Woolworth’s just as they re-priced anything that had dropped out of the top 40 that week.  Of cash-in-hand work stripping wallpaper and headlong flight from pringle-jumpered beer monsters. Of record shops and goth nightclubs.

It was this world, this idyll in urban ash-grey, which I returned to after fifteen years when I started to write the One Eyed Almanac.

And I threw everything in the pot at it.  Everything.  Every major incident and theme of those years was recalled and recycled and rendered down onto the pages of the One Eyed Almanac, a circular narrative of the lives of John Atkins and Stefan Adamczyk, that compressed it all into one headlong weekend of doledom, dodgy landlords, monsters on the bus, birds that wanted to know, birds that didn’t want to know, bikers, bedsit-logic, anarchists, acid, the black economy, parties, clubbing and the Maguffin of a vaguely valuable antique bath-tub.

I abandoned the first person for the third.  I began again.  It grew to a monstrous size, over 150,000 words.  30,000 of the (deliberately) purplest of these were devoted to an LSD trip, featuring the Revelation of The One Eyed Almanac and The Visitation of the Cockroach of Knowledge.  I got to the end, had a celebratory beer, took a deep breath and went back over it all once more, tweaking, cutting, pasting, putting in all the twiddly bits. 

 

Most of the dozen or so friends that I showed it to were complimentary, much more so than the twenty or more agents and publishers that I subsequently sent my sample chapters off to.  It would be nice to be able to say that my book was aggressively rejected.  Such was not the case.  It was rejection by pro-forma, and all the more galling for it.  Eventually I took the hint and stopped sending it out.  The postman, at least, must have been relieved.

If this sounds like sour grapes it isn’t meant to be.  I had a ball writing that book and I don’t regret for a minute all of the time that I spent upon it.  Sometimes, when the juice really flowed, I got truly high from the adrenalin of bashing the words out onto the page and of seeing the thing take shape, chapter by inexorable chapter.  Even at its best, writing has never been quite like that again.

Now, The One Eyed Almanac, in all its many scribbled and scrawled drafts and re-drafts, squats, untouched in quite a while, in several shoe boxes on the shelves in my spare room.  I’ve moved on through periods of glut and drought and distraction and blockage and through several other writing projects that have, I’m sure, bettered the Almanac in lots of ways but never again properly matched it for that first heady flush of juice.