Authors are strange people

Sunday, February 4th., 97 Chiltern Court, London.

Authors are strange people. I am one myself, and I probably know as many authors as any living man - except literary agents and income tax inspectors. Authors are ticklish, sensitive people, and, more than most categories of persons, they are victims (generally willing enough) of the astounding, and to me incomprehensible, mania for 'meeting' celebrities, notorieties and infamies. Why do I say so? Because it has been my observation over a long period of years. Why is it so? I don't know!

I regard myself as the exception that proves this particular rule. So far as I am aware I have never had the desire to meet a celebrity because he was a celebrity. On the contrary I have had, and still have, a desire to avoid him. "But you are a great admirer of his books!" said an acquaintance to me once, when I had demurred to an encounter with a genius. "Yes I am," I said. "That's why I don't want to meet him. If I run across him by chance, all right! But deliberately to go out of my way to meet him - No!" And I never did meet him.

Rightly or wrongly one has one's sense of dignity. I have been acused of having an over-developed sense of dignity, and that may be the case. But it is my sense of dignity and I cling to it. In my defence I will assert that my antipathy towards celebrity is by no means uncommon in the Midlands where I grew up. There were men in the Five Towns (and probably still are) who would not cross the street to acknowledge the existence of some local celebrity or other; they would be ashamed to do so. I have introduced them into some of my novels and stories. "The Death of Simon Fugue", which some suggest is my best short story, is a case in point. When I go to the Potteries myself I have no expectation of acknowledgement and I expect that when I die there may be a brief obituary in The Sentinel, but not such as to draw attention away from 'real' news.