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Unlike most undergraduates, I knew Cambridge well when I first went up to
King’s. Had I seen Cambridge for the first time in 1949, I might have taken
more from it. In a sense I was ready to leave as soon as I arrived.
I spent my two years studying anatomy, physiology and pathology. The
dissecting room was the gravitational centre of all medical study. Walking
into that strange, low-ceilinged chamber, halfway between a nightclub and an
abattoir, was an unnerving experience. The cadavers, greenish-yellow with
formaldehyde, lay naked on their backs, their skins covered with scars and
contusions, and seemed barely human, as if they had just been taken down
from a Grünewald Crucifixion. Several students in my group dropped out,
unable to cope with the sight of their first dead bodies, but in many ways
the experience of dissection was just as overwhelming for me. Nearly 60
years later, I still think that my two years of anatomy were among the most
important of my life, and helped to frame a large part of my imagination.
Both before and during the war, in Shanghai, I had seen a great many corpses,
some at very close quarters, and like everyone else I had neutralised my
emotional response by telling myself: “This is grim, but sadly part of
life.” Now, only a few years later, I was dissecting dead human beings,
paring back the layers of skin and fat to reach the muscles below, then
separating these to reveal the nerves and blood vessels. In a way I was
conducting my own autopsy on all those dead Chinese I had seen lying by the
roadside. I was carrying out a kind of emotional and even moral
investigation into my own past while discovering the vast and mysterious
world of the human body.
Most of the cadavers were those of doctors who had willed their bodies for
dissection. There was one female cadaver, a strong-jawed woman of late
middle age, whose bald head shone brightly under the lights. Most of the
male medical students gave her a wide berth. None of us had seen a naked
woman of our mothers’ age, alive or dead, and there was a certain authority
in her face, perhaps that of a senior gynaecologist or GP. I was drawn to
her, though not for the obvious sexual reasons; her breasts had subsided
into the fatty tissue on her chest, and many of the students assumed she was
male. But I was intrigued by the small scars on her arms, the calluses on
her hands she had probably carried from childhood, and tried to reconstruct
the life she had led, the long years as a medical student, her first
affairs, marriage and children. One day I found her dissected head in the
locker among the other heads. The exposed layers of muscles in her face were
like the pages of an ancient book, or a pack of cards waiting to be
reshuffled into another life.
My years in the dissection room were important because they taught me that
though death was the end, the human imagination and the human spirit could
triumph over our own dissolution. In many ways my entire fiction is the
dissection of a deep pathology I had witnessed in Shanghai and later in the
postwar world, from the threat of nuclear war to the assassination of
President Kennedy, from the death of my wife to the violence that
underpinned the entertainment culture of the last decades of the 20th
century. Or it may be that my two years in the dissecting room were an
unconscious way of keeping Shanghai alive by other means. At all events, by
the time I completed the anatomy course I had really completed my time at
Cambridge. It had supplied me with a huge stock of memories, of mysterious
feelings for the dead doctors who in a sense had come to my aid, and with a
vast fund of anatomical metaphors that would thread through all my fiction.
By comparison, college life seemed like a quaint and overly folkloric pageant.
I enjoyed punting on the river, playing tennis, writing short stories,
getting drunk with the Addenbrooke’s nurses, who generously provided me with
an education not even the dissecting room could match.
They were interesting young women, some with remarkably rackety lives (the
syringes in the bedside table drawer?).
I also, with everyone else, went to a great many films. I relished hard-edged
American thrillers, with their expressive black-and-white photography and
brooding atmosphere, their tales of alienation and emotional betrayal.
Already I sensed a new kind of popular culture was emerging that played on
the latent psychopathy of its audiences, and in fact needed to elicit that
strain of psychopathy if it was to work. The willing engagement of the
audience’s own psychopathy is almost a definition of modernism as a whole.
But this was strongly denied by FR Leavis and his notion of the novel as a
moral criticism of life. I went to one of his lectures and remember saying
to the English student who had taken me: “It’s more important to go to T-Men
[a classic noir film].” It sounded preposterous at the time, but less so
now.
Varsity, the student weekly newspaper, staged an annual short story
competition, and my entry, a Hemingwayesque effort called The Violent Noon,
won joint first prize in 1951. I told my father I wanted to give up medicine
and become a writer. He was dismayed, especially as I had no idea of how to
bring this about. He decided I should study English literature, the worst
possible preparation for a writer’s career, which he may well have
suspected. I managed to get a place at London University, at Queen Mary
College, and started the degree course in October 1951.
I enjoyed my year at Queen Mary College. I travelled on the Tube with people
who were going to work, and I could almost imagine that I was doing a job. I
also liked the social mix of students. They came from all possible
backgrounds, with very different approaches to everything. They were all
intelligent, which wasn’t true of Cambridge undergraduates, and already had
original ideas about the world. When I mentioned I had been born in China
and interned during the war, they noted this in the way they would have
reacted had I told them I was born in a North Sea trawler or a lighthouse.
The English course was interesting, but modern fiction played no part in it,
and at the end of my first year I decided to leave. My attempts to write a
new experimental novel were a complete flop. I needed to get away from
academic institutions, and I needed to be free of all financial dependence
on my parents, a sentiment I am sure they shared. They were strongly opposed
to my hopes of becoming a professional writer, and I found their hostility
wearing.
My problem was that I hadn’t found a form that suited me. Flying still
interested me, and I began to notice advertisements for short-service
commissions in the RAF. The flight training was in Canada, an added
attraction. A change of scene, from grey and overcrowded London to Canada’s
vast spaces, would give me time to think and with any luck be a spur to my
imagination. I was still only 23, but my career as a novelist showed no
signs of ever beginning.
In the autumn of 1954 we sailed on one of the Empress liners, then spent a
month at an RCAF base near London, Ontario, not far from Niagara Falls. We
were all eager to embrace the North American way of life. We arrived at our
training base in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, as the first snow was falling, and
I think it was still falling when I left the following spring. A wilderness
of ice and snow was not the best location for a flying school. For long
periods we had nothing to do but sit in the flight rooms, reading magazines
and watching the snow fall on the buried runways. Now and then a moose would
leap the perimeter fence and gallop off into the mist. In the very
comfortable mess, virtually a four-star hotel, I would sit by the picture
windows and watch the snow carried horizontally by the icy wind.
With a great deal of time on my hands, I wrote a few short stories and tried
to find enough reading matter to keep me going. Most of the paperbacks in
the bus depot were popular thrillers and detective stories, but there was
one type of fiction that occupied a lot of space. This was science fiction,
then enjoying its great postwar boom. I had read little, apart from the Buck
Rogers and Flash Gordon strips of my Shanghai childhood. I would later
realise most professional SF writers, British and American, were keen fans
from their early teens, and many began their careers writing for fanzines. I
was one of the very few who came to science fiction at a relatively late
age. By the mid1950s there were some 20 SF magazines on monthly sale in
America and Canada, and the best of these were in the Moose Jaw magazine
racks.
These I seized on and began to devour. Here was a form of fiction that was
actually about the present day, and often as elliptical and ambiguous as
Kafka. It recognised a world dominated by consumer advertising, of
democratic government mutating into public relations. This was a world of
cars, offices, highways, airlines and supermarkets that we actually lived
in, but which was completely missing from almost all serious fiction. Nobody
in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car.
Nobody in Sartre or Thomas Mann ever paid for a haircut. Nobody in
Hemingway’s postwar novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged
exposure to the threat of nuclear war.
The very notion was ludicrous, as absurd then as it seems now. Writers of
so-called serious fiction shared one dominant characteristic – their fiction
was first and foremost about themselves. The “self” lay at the heart of
modernism, but now had a powerful rival, the everyday world, which was just
as much a psychological construct, and just as prone to mysterious and often
psychopathic impulses. It was this rather sinister realm, a consumer society
that might decide to go on a day trip to another Auschwitz and another
Hiroshima, that science fiction was exploring.
Above all, the SF genre had a huge vitality. Without a plan of action, I
decided this was a field I should enter. Here was a literary form that
placed a premium on originality and gave latitude to its writers. I could
see that both Canada and the USA were changing rapidly, and that change
would in time reach even Britain. I would interiorise science fiction,
looking for the pathology that underlay the consumer society, the TV
landscape and the nuclear arms race, a vast, untouched continent of
fictional possibility. Or so I thought, staring at the silent airfield, with
its empty runways that stretched into a snow-blanched infinity.
