The news last week of the death of Kurt Vonnegut reminded me of one of the more embarrassing moments of my writing and reviewing career. If Vonnegut has perchance passed on safely to the heavens of Tralfamadore, I'm sure he would appreciate the irony.
It was 1960, and I was a tyro teenage reviewer for a small French science fiction magazine called SATELLITE (now long defunct). Being an English schoolkid in Paris with literary aspirations, I was lucky enough that on regular mid-term holidays back in London I would invariably pick up, mostly at a dusty secondhand book-and-magazine emporium in Walthamstow, hordes of US and British genre magazines and fairly new paperbacks by authors who had not yet come to the attention of French publishers. And I'd managed to convince the SATELLITE guys to give me an irregular column in which I could preview the new science fiction talent emerging in English.
On one such trip, I'd found a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan in the Dell paperback original version with a thinly-veiled nude waltzing across the cover against a galactic background of stars and cosmos. I should mention that the Walthamstow store also liberally shelved yards of Health and Efficiency and other sundry naturist magazines just next to the science fiction section. And in some of these, the genital areas weren't even airbrushed! I still wonder if that prurient sexual association provoked me to pick up the Vonnegut book? Come on, I was only 15!
At any rate, I read the book and was both disappointed and annoyed. To my purist mind, this was bad science fiction and a stain on the reputation of my beloved genre. The plot was not sequential, there were no positive heroes or even a hint of science or sense of wonder. It was all too much and I wrote an absolute stinker of a review, which still haunts me today, in which I affirmed with expert conviction that this was of course the last any of us would hear of this Kurt Vonnegut man, and a good thing too. And by the way, I did warm to Vonnegut in later, more mature years, and agree that Slaughterhouse-Five is a memorable book. But I never did become an assiduous fan, I'm sorry to say.
Ah, the folly of youth! Needless to say, my assessment of Vonnegut to a readership of less than 2,500 had no adverse effect on his career.
One year later, I sold my first SF book to the now much-lamented editor Elisabeth Gille at Editions Denoel (herself the daughter of the now rediscovered Irène Nemirovsky) and do you know what happened? It was published in the same month alongside the French translation of The Sirens of Titan. I have a feeling it also achieved somewhat better sales. So it goes ...
