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(Ebook) The Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams ISBN 952642fd-245e-4e42-82af-d6371abbc4a4, 952642FD-245E-4E42-82AF-D6371ABBC4A4
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(Ebook) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
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(Ebook) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
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The Salmon of Doubt is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2002 by Completely Unexpected Productions, Ltd.
Introduction © 2003 by Terry Jones
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
This edition published by arrangement with Harmony Books, a member of The Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: American Atheist Press: “Interview with Douglas Adams” American Atheist, vol. 40, no. 1(Winter 2001-2002). Reprinted by permission of the American Atheist Press. Byron Press Visual Publications: “Introduction” from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (Collected Edition) DC Comics, volume 1 (May 1997). Reprinted by permission of Byron Press Visual Publications. Daily Nexus: “Interview with Daily Nexus” by Brendan Buhler, of the University of California Santa Barbara Daily Nexus, Artsweek, (April 5, 2001). Reprinted by permission of Daily Nexus. Richard Dawkins: “A Lament for Douglas Adams” by Richard Dawkins, The Guardian (May 14, 2001). Reprinted by permission of the author. The Graham Chapman Estate: “The Private Life of Genghis Khan” Based in part on an original sketch by Graham Chapman and written by Graham Chapman and Douglas Adams for the Graham Chapman Television
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
AnIntroduction to the Introduction to the New Edition
Introduction to the New Edition
Editor’s Note
Introduction
Prologue
LIFE
THE UNIVERSE
AND EVERYTHING
The Salmon of Doubt
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
An Introduction to the Introduction to the New Edition
This Introduction to the Introduction to the New Edition is a highly significant one in the history of Introductions. Its presence on these pages means that this book has achieved the World Record for the Number of Introductions in a Book of This Nature. With the addition of this Introduction to the Introduction to the New Edition, The Salmon of Doubt can now claim to have no less than three Introductions, one Prologue, and one Editor’s Note. That is two Introductions more than Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and one Introduction, one Prologue, and one Editor’s Note more than The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature. Even the Oxford English Dictionary can only boast one Preface, one Historical Introduction, one General Explanations, and a List of Abbreviations— that’s two Introductions short of The Salmon ofDoubt.
You are, without doubt, holding in your hands one of the bestintroduced books in the English language. We hope you enjoy the Introduction to the New Edition that follows this Introduction to it and continue to read on even into the book itself.
Terry
Jones FEBRUARY 2, 2003
—Terry Jones
FEBRUARY 1, 2003
Editor’s Note
I first met Douglas Adams in 1990. Newly appointed his editor at Harmony Books, I had flown to London in search of Douglas’s longoverdue fifth Hitchhiker novel, Mostly Harmless. No sooner was I buzzed in the door to the Adams residence in Islington than a large, ebullient man bounded down the long staircase, greeted me warmly, and thrust a handful of pages at me. “See what you think of these,” he said over his shoulder as he bounded back up the stairs. An hour later he was back, new pages in hand, eager to hear my opinion of the first batch. And so the afternoon passed, quiet stretches of reading alternating with more bounding, more conversation, and fresh pages. This, it turned out, was Douglas’s favorite way of working.
In September 2001, four months after Douglas’s tragic, unexpected death, I received a phone call from his agent, Ed Victor. A good friend had preserved the contents of Douglas’s many beloved Macintosh computers; would I be interested in combing through the files to see if they contained the makings of a book? A few days later a package arrived, and, curiosity whetted, I tore it open.
My first thought was that Douglas’s friend, Chris Ogle, had undertaken a Herculean task—which, as it turned out, he had. The CD-ROM onto which Douglas’s writing had been collected contained 2,579 items, ranging from huge files that stored the complete text of Douglas’s books to letters on behalf of “Save the Rhino,” a favorite charity. Here, too, were fascinating glimpses into dozens of halfbrewed ideas for books, films, and television programs, some as brief as a sentence or two, others running to half-a-dozen pages. Alongside these were drafts of speeches, pieces Douglas had written for his website, introductions to various books and events, and musings on subjects near to Douglas’s heart: music, technology,
science, endangered species, travel, and single-malt whisky (to name just a few). Finally, I found dozens of versions of the new novel Douglas had been wrestling with for the better part of the past decade. Sorting these out to arrive at the work-in-progress you’ll find in the third section of this book would prove my greatest challenge, although that makes it sound difficult. It was not. As quickly as questions arose they seemed to answer themselves.
Conceived as a third Dirk Gently novel, Douglas’s novel-in-progress began life as A Spoon Too Short, and was described as such in his files until August 1993. From this point forward, folders refer to the novel as The Salmon of Doubt, and fall into three categories. From oldest to most recent, they are: “The Old Salmon,” “The Salmon of Doubt,” and “LA/Rhino/Ranting Manor.” Reading through these various versions, I decided that for the purposes of this book, Douglas would be best served if I stitched together the strongest material, regardless of when it was written, much as I might have proposed doing were he still alive. So from “The Old Salmon” I reinstated what is now the first chapter, on DaveLand. The following six chapters come intact from the second, and longest, continuous version, “The Salmon of Doubt.” Then, with an eye to keeping the story line clear, I dropped in two of his three most recent chapters from “LA/Rhino/Ranting Manor” (which became Chapters Eight and Nine). For Chapter Ten I went back to the last chapter from “The Salmon of Doubt,” then concluded with the final chapter from Douglas’s most recent work from “LA/Rhino/Ranting Manor.” To give the reader a sense of what Douglas planned for the rest of the novel, I preceded all this with a fax from Douglas to his London editor, Sue Freestone, who worked closely with Douglas on his books from the very first.
Inspired by reading these various Adams treasures on the CDROM, I enlisted the invaluable aid of Douglas’s personal assistant, Sophie Astin, to cast the net wider. Were there other jewels we might include in a book tribute to Douglas’s life? As it turned out, during fallow periods between books or multimedia mega-projects, Douglas had written articles for newspapers and magazines. These,
Introduction
Douglas Adams was in every sense of the word larger than life. To begin with he was prodigious in stature, towering over the world at six feet five inches or more. (Indeed, even as a child on school trips, Douglas writes, his teachers “wouldn’t say ‘meet under the clock tower,’ or ‘meet under the War Memorial,’ but ‘meet under Adams.’”)
He was larger than life as a personality, too: expansive and joyous and perpetually curious, always intrigued by new opportunities, and eager to pursue them with a single-mindedness and charm that usually proved irresistible. I had the good fortune to have lunch with him in Islington a few hours after he had received a formal invitation as a result of his recent embrace of the “Save the Rhino International” movement—offering him the opportunity to get dressed up as a rhinoceros and, despite being weighed down by the cumbersome costume, climb Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa. The event was, apparently, imminent, and, of course, the proposed date for the climb coincided with several important writing deadlines. (Douglas was also peerless in his ability to procrastinate— but more about that later.) “Are you going to do it?” I asked. “Of course,” he replied, “Why wouldn’t I?” (And he did an adventure recounted in “The Rhino Climb,” which appears, for the first time in book form, in this volume.)
One of Douglas’s most endearing attributes was the incessant delight he took in sharing his wide-ranging, and always evolving, ideas and enthusiasms with virtually anyone who seemed to appreciate them. Indeed, it was this quality, along with his unparalleled humor, kindness, and generosity, that made him such a unique and wonderful friend. I first met him at an American Bookseller’s Association convention in the early 1980s. We were introduced by our mutual colleague (and literary agent) Ed Victor,
a few hundred others) at an international conference sponsored by Apple Computer—when I received a breathless call from him: “If I can persuade Gary Brooker to have dinner with me in London the day after our meetings are done with, will you promise to fly back to New York via the U.K and join us?”
“Have you actually ever met Gary Brooker?” I asked.
“Not yet,” he confessed. “In fact, I’m not even exactly sure how to find him. But England is a small country. . . . So then, will you promise?”
I did, and the next thing I knew—having traveled three-quarters of the way around the world in less than a week—I found myself sitting with Douglas, his wife Jane, and a somewhat puzzled Gary Brooker at the Adams’s dinner table in Islington. We happily peppered Brooker with questions about his career and work, and it turned out (why should it have been a surprise?) that Douglas— there was apparently nothing he couldn’t do well actually remembered some of Gary’s songs better that Gary did, and sat down at the piano to remind him how to play them.
Above all, of course, Douglas Adams was a transcendent, multifaceted, comic genius. What made Douglas’s work unique, I think, were the wildly contradictory attributes he displayed in his writing. He seamlessly blended world-class intelligence and a daunting knowledge about an impossible variety of subjects (literature, computers, evolution, pop culture, genetics, and music, to name but a few)—with cosmic silliness; technophobia with a lust for, and fascination with, every high-tech toy imaginable; deep cynicism about virtually everything with an effusively joyful spirit; and one of the quickest wits I’ve ever encountered with a relentless perfectionism in pursuing his craft.
Mix in a bit of impish mischief (if, indeed, anyone who weighed over 260 pounds could ever be accused of being “impish”), an unrivaled sense of irony, and a peculiar knack for making absurd— yet logical connections, and you get such one-of-a-kind creations as the line of electromechanical security robots who repeatedly shout “Resistance is useless!” even as they’re destroyed by their
perfectionism and a terror of failing in his quest to put, as he liked to phrase it, “a hundred thousand words in a cunning order”) are even more extraordinary; the rhino climb referenced above must certainly have startled the editor whose deadline Douglas missed because of it, as, I’m sure, did the unexpected news of his hastily-arranged trip to Australia to attempt a “comparative test drive” between a “sub bug” a sort of underwater jet ski designed to propel scuba divers and a manta ray, an excursion which caused him to miss yet another crucial due date (see “Riding the Rays,” also reprinted in this book).
Unfortunately incomprehensibly! a heart attack that no one could have predicted has prevented Douglas from postponing the completion of his long-awaited, and many-times delayed next book, The Salmon ofDoubt, which interviews just before his death indicate he was still many, many months if not years! away from finishing. Would it have remained a Dirk Gently book, or would he instead have transformed it—as he hinted he might—into the sixth and final volume in the Hitchhiker trilogy? Why I find myself wondering didn’t he find an excuse to procrastinate during his fateful trip to the gym last spring?
Television viewers who tune into Between the Lions, the daily children’s literacy education program that Michael Frith another of Douglas’s American friends—and I helped create for PBS, will note that one of the lead lion characters, Lionel, habitually wears a rugby shirt featuring the number 42. This small testament may not be the answer to “life, the universe, and everything” (as the famed “Deep Thought” computer from the Hitchhiker trilogy determined “42” to be), but if it serves to remind people what a brilliant, unique, irreplaceable force Douglas Adams was in the lives of virtually everyone who knew or read him—well, at least it’s a step in the right direction.
Douglas, I loved you dearly and I’ll miss you terribly. And I’m grateful you left that hard disk behind so we can all share this one last conversation with you . . .
Christopher Cerf
New York FEBRUARY 2002
Prologue
Nicholas Wroe, in The Guardian
SATURDAY, JUNE 3, 2000
IN 1979, SOON AFTER The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was published, Douglas Adams was invited to sign copies at a small science-fiction bookshop in Soho. As he drove there, some sort of demonstration slowed his progress. “There was a traffic jam and crowds of people were everywhere,” he recalls. It wasn’t until he had pushed his way inside that Adams realised the crowds were there for him. Next day his publisher called to say he was number one in the London Sunday Times best-seller list and his life changed forever. “It was like being helicoptered to the top of Mount Everest,” he says, “or having an orgasm without the foreplay.”
Hitchhiker had already been a cult radio show, and was made in both television and stage versions. It expanded into four more books that sold over 14 million copies worldwide. There were records and computer games and now, after twenty years of Hollywood prevarication, it is as close as it’s ever been to becoming a movie.
The story itself begins on earth with mild-mannered suburbanite Arthur Dent trying to stop the local council demolishing his house to build a bypass. It moves into space when his friend, Ford Prefect some have seen him as Virgil to Dent’s Dante reveals himself as a representative of a planet near Betelgeuse and informs Arthur that the Earth itself is about to be demolished to make way for a hyperspace express route. They hitch a ride on a Vogon spaceship and begin to use the Hitchhiker’s Guide itself a usually reliable repository of all knowledge about life, the universe and everything.
“Anyone who knew my father will tell you that management was not something he knew very much about.”
The family were “fairly hard up” and left Cambridge six months after Douglas was born to live in various homes on the fringes of East London. When Adams was five, his parents divorced. “It’s amazing the degree to which children treat their own lives as normal,” he says. “But of course it was difficult. My parents divorced when it wasn’t remotely as common as it is now, and to be honest I have scant memory of anything before I was five. I don’t think it was a great time, one way or another.”
After the breakup, Douglas and his younger sister went with their mother to Brentwood in Essex, where she ran a hostel for sick animals. He saw his by now comparatively wealthy father at weekends, and these visits became a source of confusion and tension. To add to the complications, several step-siblings emerged as his parents remarried. Adams has said that while he accepted all this as normal on one level, he did “behave oddly as a result,” and remembers himself as a twitchy and somewhat strange child. For a time his teachers thought he was educationally subnormal, but by the time he went to the direct-grant Brentwood Prep School, he was regarded as extremely bright.
The school boasts a remarkably diverse list of postwar alumni: clothing designer Hardy Amies; the disgraced historian David Irving; TV presenter Noel Edmonds; Home Secretary Jack Straw; and London Times editor Peter Stothard were all there before Adams, while comedians Griff Rhys Jones and Keith Allen were a few years behind him. There are four alumni two Labour and two Conservative—in the current House of Commons. In a scene that now seems rather incongruous in the light of Keith Allen’s hard-living image, it was Adams who helped the seven-year-old Allen with his piano lessons.
When Adams was thirteen, his mother remarried and moved to Dorset, and Adams changed from being a “day boy” at the school to a boarder. It appears to have been an entirely beneficial experience. “Whenever I left school at four in the afternoon, I always used to
look at what the boarders were doing rather wistfully,” he says. “They seemed to be having a good time, and in fact I thoroughly enjoyed boarding. There is a piece of me that likes to fondly imagine my maverick and rebellious nature. But more accurately I like to have a nice and cosy institution that I can rub up against a little bit. There is nothing better than a few constraints you can comfortably kick against.”
Adams ascribes the quality of his education to being taught by some “very good, committed, obsessed and charismatic people.” At a recent party in London he confronted Jack Straw on New Labour’s apparent antipathy to direct-grant schools, on the basis that it had done neither of them much harm.
Frank Halford was a master at the school and remembers Adams as “very tall even then, and popular. He wrote an end-of-term play when Doctor Who had just started on television. He called it ‘Doctor Which.’ ” Many years later, Adams did write scripts for Doctor Who. He describes Halford as an inspirational teacher who is still a support. “He once gave me ten out of ten for a story, which was the only time he did throughout his long school career. And even now, when I have a dark night of the soul as a writer and think that I can’t do this anymore, the thing that I reach for is not the fact that I have had best-sellers or huge advances. It is the fact that Frank Halford once gave me ten out of ten, and at some fundamental level I must be able to do it.”
It seems that from the beginning Adams had a facility for turning his writing into cash. He sold some short, “almost haiku-length,” stories to the Eagle comic and received ten shillings. “You could practically buy a yacht for ten shillings then,” he laughs. But his real interest was music. He learned to play the guitar by copying note for note the intricate finger-picking patterns on an early Paul Simon album. He now has a huge collection of left-handed electric guitars, but admits that he’s “really a folkie at heart. Even with Pink Floyd on stage, I played a very simple guitar figure from ‘Brain Damage’ which was in a finger-picking style.”
Adams grew up in the sixties, and the Beatles “planted a seed in my head that made it explode. Every nine months there’d be a new album which would be an earth-shattering development from where they were before. We were so obsessed by them that when ‘Penny Lane’ came out and we hadn’t heard it on the radio, we beat up this boy who had heard it until he hummed the tune to us. People now ask if Oasis are as good as the Beatles. I don’t think they are as good as the Rutles.”
The other key influence was Monty Python. Having listened to mainstream British radio comedy of the fifties he describes it as an “epiphanous” moment when he discovered that being funny could be a way in which intelligent people expressed themselves—“and be very, very silly at the same time.”
The logical next step was to go to Cambridge University, “because I wanted to join Footlights,” he says. “I wanted to be a writerperformer like the Pythons. In fact I wanted to be John Cleese and it took me some time to realise that the job was in fact taken.”
At university he quickly abandoned performing—“I just wasn’t reliable”—and began to write self-confessed Pythonesque sketches. He recalls one about a railway worker who was reprimanded for leaving all the switches open on the southern region to prove a point about existentialism; and another about the difficulties in staging the Crawley Paranoid Society annual general meeting.
The arts administrator Mary Allen, formerly of the Arts Council and the Royal Opera, was a contemporary at Cambridge and has remained a friend ever since. She performed his material and remembers him as “always noticed even amongst a very talented group of people. Douglas’s material was very quirky and individualistic. You had to suit it, and it had to suit you. Even in short sketches he created a weird world.”
Adams says, “I did have something of a guilt thing about reading English. I thought I should have done something useful and challenging. But while I was whingeing, I also relished the chance not to do very much.” Even his essays were full of jokes. “If I had known then what I know now, I would have done biology or zoology.
could write things that lasted thirty seconds, and Douglas was incapable of writing a single sentence that lasted less than thirty seconds.”
With his dreams of being a writer crumbling around him, Adams took a series of bizarre jobs, including working as a chicken-shed cleaner and as a bodyguard to the ruling family of Qatar. “I think the security firm must have been desperate. I got the job from an ad in the Evening Standard.” Griff Rhys Jones did the same job for a while on Adams’s recommendation. Adams recalls becoming increasingly depressed as he endured night shifts of sitting outside hotel bedrooms: “I kept thinking this wasn’t how it was supposed to have worked out.” At Christmas he went to visit his mother and stayed there for the next year.
He recalls a lot of family worry about what he was going to do, and while he still sent in the occasional sketch to radio shows, he acknowledges that his confidence was extremely low. Despite his subsequent success and wealth, this propensity for a lack of confidence has continued. “I have terrible periods of lack of confidence,” he explains. “I just don’t believe I can do it and no evidence to the contrary will sway me from that view. I briefly did therapy, but after a while I realised it is just like a farmer complaining about the weather. You can’t fix the weather—you just have to get on with it.” So has that approach helped him? “Not necessarily,” he shrugs.
Hitchhiker was the last throw of the dice, but in retrospect the timing was absolutely right. Star Wars had made science fiction voguish, and the aftermath of Monty Python meant that while a sketch show was out of the question, there was scope to appeal to the same comic sensibility.
Python Terry Jones heard the tapes before transmission and remembers being struck by Adams’s “intellectual approach and strong conceptual ideas. You feel the stuff he is writing has come from a criticism of life, as Matthew Arnold might say. It has a moral basis and a critical basis that has a strong mind behind it. For instance, John Cleese has a powerful mind, but he is more logical
and analytical. Douglas is more quirky and analytical.” Geoffrey Perkins agrees, but remembers there was little grand plan behind the project.
“Douglas went into it with a whole load of ideas but very little notion of what the story would be. He was writing it in an almost Dickensian mode of episodic weekly installments without quite knowing how it would end.”
By the time the series aired in 1978, Adams says, he had put about nine months’ solid work into it and had been paid one thousand pounds. “There seemed to be quite a long way to go before I broke even,” so he accepted a producer’s job at the BBC but quit six months later when he found himself simultaneously writing a second radio series, the novel, the television series, and episodes of Doctor Who. Despite this remarkable workload, he was already building a legendary reputation for not writing. “I love deadlines,” he has said. “I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
Success only added to his ability to prevaricate. His publishing editor, Sue Freestone, quickly realised that he treated writing as performance art, and so she set up her office in his dining room. “He needs an instant audience to bounce things off, but sometimes this can weirdly backfire.
“There was a scene early in one book when he talked about some plates with, very definitely, one banana on each. This was obviously significant, so I asked him to explain. But he liked to tease his audience and he said he’d tell me later. We eventually got to the end of the book and I asked him again, ‘Okay, Douglas, what’s with the bananas?’ He looked at me completely blankly. He had forgotten all about the bananas. I still occasionally ask him if he has remembered yet, but apparently he hasn’t.”
Writer and producer John Lloyd has been a friend and collaborator with Adams since before Hitchhiker. He remembers the “agonies of indecision and panic” Adams got into when writing. “We were on holiday in Corfu with three friends when he was finishing a book, and he ended up taking over the whole house. He had a room to write in, a room to sleep in, a room to go to when he couldn’t sleep,
and so on. It didn’t occur to him that other people might want a good night’s sleep as well. He goes through life with a brain the size of a planet, and often seems to be living on a different one. He is absolutely not a malicious person, but when he is in the throes of panic and terror and unable to finish a book, everything else pales into insignificance.”
However the work was dragged out, it was extremely popular. The books all became bestsellers, and Adams was given an advance of over $2 million by his American publishers. He wrote a hilarious spoof dictionary with John Lloyd, The Meaning of Liff, in which easily recognised concepts, such as the feeling you get at four in the afternoon when you haven’t got enough done, were given the names of towns—Farnham being the perfect choice for this lowgrade depression. In the late eighties he completed two spoof detective novels featuring Dirk Gently.
For all his facility with humour, Freestone says she has been touched by how profoundly Adams’s work has connected with some readers. “In Hitchhiker, all you have to do to be safe is have your towel with you,” she explains. “I heard about this woman who was dying in a hospice who felt she would be fine because she had her towel with her. She had taken Douglas’s universe and incorporated it into her own. It embarrassed the hell out of Douglas when he heard about it. But for her it was literally a symbol of safety when embarking on an unknown journey.”
There are serious themes within his work. The second Dirk Gently novel can easily be read as being about people who are homeless, displaced, and alienated from society. “His imagination goes much deeper than just cleverness,” says Freestone. “The social criticism is usually buried by the comedy, but it’s there if you want to find it.”
Having been through such a lean period, Adams worked constantly until the mid-nineties, when he very deliberately applied the brakes. “I had got absolutely stuck in the middle of a novel, and although it sounds ungrateful, having to do huge book signings would drive me to angry depressions.”
He says that he still thought of himself as a scriptwriter and only inadvertently found himself as a novelist. “It sounds absurd, but a bit of me felt cheated and it also felt as if I had cheated. And then there is the money cycle. You’re paid a lot and you’re not happy, so the first thing you do is buy stuff that you don’t want or need—for which you need more money.”
His financial affairs got into a mess in the 1980s, he says. He won’t discuss the details, but says that the knock-on effect was considerable, so that everyone assumed he was wealthier than he actually was. It is possible to track the movement of Adams’s life even between the first and second series of the radio show. In the first there were a lot of jokes about pubs and being without any money. The second had more jokes about expensive restaurants and accountants.
“I felt like a mouse in a wheel,” he says. “There was no pleasure coming into the cycle at any point. When you write your first book aged twenty-five or so, you have twenty-five years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon you begin to run on empty.”
His response to running out of fuel was to attempt some “creative crop rotation.” In particular, his interest in technology took off, as did a burgeoning passion for environmental issues. In 1990 he wrote Last Chance to See. “As is the way of these things, it was my least successful book, but is still the thing I am most proud of.”
The book began when he was sent to Madagascar by a magazine to find a rare type of lemur. He thought this would be quite interesting, but it turned into a complete revelation. His fascination with ecology led to an interest in evolution. “I’d been given a thread to pull, and following that lead began to open up issues to me that became the object of the greatest fascination.” A link at the bottom of his e-mails now directs people to the Dian Fossey Trust, which works to protect gorillas, and Save the Rhino. Adams was also a signatory to the Great Ape Project, which argued for a change of
moral status for great apes, recognising their rights to “life, liberty, and freedom from torture.”
He was a founding member of the team that launched Comic Relief, but he has never been a hairshirt sort of activist. The parties he held at his Islington home would feature music by various legendary rock stars Gary Brooker of Procol Harum once sang the whole of “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” including all the abandoned verses—and were peopled by media aristocracy and high-tech billionaires. Slightly less orthodoxly—for an enthusiastic, almost evangelical atheist he would also host carol services every Christmas.
“As a child I was an active Christian. I used to love the school choir and remember the carol service as always such an emotional thing.” He adds Bach to the Beatles and the Pythons in his pantheon of influences, but how does this square with his passionate atheism? “Life is full of things that move or affect you in one way or another,” he explains. “The fact that I think Bach was mistaken doesn’t alter the fact that I think the B-minor Mass is one of the great pinnacles of human achievement. It still absolutely moves me to tears to hear it. I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.”
This attachment to traditional structures, if not traditional beliefs, is carried over in the fact that his daughter, Polly, who was born in 1994, has four non-godparents. Mary Allen is one of them, and it was she who introduced Adams to his wife, the barrister Jane Belson. Allen says, “In the early eighties Douglas was going through some writing crisis and was ringing me every day. I eventually asked him whether he was lonely. It seemed that he was, so we decided he needed someone to share his huge flat. Jane moved in.” After several false starts, they married in 1991 and lived in Islington until last year, when the family moved to Santa Barbara. Adams says the initial move was harder than he expected. “I’ve only recently understood how opposed to the move my wife was.” He now says he would recommend it to anyone “in the depths of
CAREER: 1974–78radio andtelevision writer; 1978BBCradio producer.
SOME SCRIPTS: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1978and 1980(radio), 1981(television).
GAMES: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1984; Bureaucracy, 1987; Starship Titanic, 1997.
BOOKS: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1979; The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, 1980; Life, the Universe and Everything, 1982; The Meaning of Liff (withJohn Lloyd), 1983; So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, 1984; Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, 1987; The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, 1988; Last Chance to See, 1990; The Deeper Meaning of Liff (withJohn Lloyd), 1990; Mostly Harmless, 1992.
The sweat was dripping down my face and into my lap, making my clothes very wet and sticky. I sat there, walking, watching. I was trembling violently as I sat, looking at the small slot, waiting ever waiting. My nails dug into my flesh as I clenched my hands. I passed my arm over my hot, wet face, down which sweat was pouring. The suspense was unbearable. I bit my lip in an attempt to stop trembling with the terrible burden ofanxiety. Suddenly, the slot openedand in droppedthe mail. Igrabbedat my Eagle andrippedoffthe wrappingpaper. Myordealwas over for another week!
D. N. Adams(12), Brentwood, Essex, JANUARY 23, 1965, Eagle and Boys’WorldMagazine
[Editor’s Note: In the sixties The Eagle was an enormously popular English science-fiction magazine. This letter is the first known publishedworkofDouglas Adams, thenage twelve.]
in my mind. I would realize that the reason I was confused was that I was listening to Something that was simply unlike anything that anybody had done before. “Another Girl,” “Good Day Sunshine,” and the extraordinary “Drive My Car.” These tracks are so familiar now that it takes a special effort of will to remember how alien they seemed at first to me. The Beatles were now not just writing songs, they were inventing the very medium in which they were working.
I never got to see them. Difficult to believe, I know. I was alive at the time the Beatles were performing and never got to see them. I tend to go on about this rather a lot. Do not go to San Francisco with me, or I will insist on pointing out Candlestick Park to you and bleating on about the fact that in 1966 the Beatles played their last concert there, just shortly before I’d woken up to the fact that rock concerts were things you could actually go to, even if you lived in Brentwood.
A friend of mine at school once had some studio tickets to see David Frost’s show being recorded, but we ended up not going. I watched the show that night, and the Beatles were on it playing “Hey Jude.” I was ill for about a year. Another day that I happened not to go to London after all was the day they played their rooftop concert in Savile Row. I can’t ever speak about that.
Well, the years passed. The Beatles passed. But Paul McCart-ney has gone on and on. A few months ago the guitarist Robbie McIntosh phoned me and said, “We’re playing at the Mean Fiddler in a few days, do you want to come along?”
Now this is one of the daftest questions I’ve ever been asked, and I think it took me a few moments even to work out what he meant. The Mean Fiddler, for those who don’t know, is a pub in an unlovely part of northwest London with a room at the back where bands play. You can probably get about two hundred people in.
It was the word we that temporarily confused me, because I knew that the band that Robbie was currently playing in was Paul McCartney’s, and I didn’t think that Paul McCartney played in pubs. If Paul McCartney did play in pubs, then it would be daft to think that I would not saw my own leg off in order to go. I went.
