The Tin Men

Also available by the same author

The Russian Interpreter

Towards the End of the Morning

A Very Private Life

Sweet Dreams

Matchbox Theatre

THE TIN MEN

MICHAEL FRAYN

VALANCOURT BOOKS

The Tin Men by Michael Frayn

First published in Great Britain by Collins in 1965

First U.S. edition published by Little, Brown and Co. in 1965

First Valancourt Books edition 2015

Copyright © 1965 by Michael Frayn

Introduction copyright © 2015 by Michael Frayn

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.

Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

http://www.valancourtbooks.com

Cover photograph: USDA officials using an IBM 360 computer, 1966. Reproduced under a Flickr Creative Commons license.

Cover design by Henry Petrides

INTRODUCTION

My first novel, published exactly fifty years ago. Always something of a challenge for the young writer, that first novel. These days, judging by the number of courses you see advertised offer­ing to teach you how to write one, it must be a rite of passage almost as common as the first date or the first driving lesson. A bit daunting still, all the same.

In my case, actually, I wasn’t really so young – thirty-two, an age by which a lot of writers have written not only their first novel but their best – even their last – and are already sinking into obscurity, celebrity, or alcoholism. It had been hanging over me, like a mountain waiting to be climbed, for quite some time. But I’d been writing a humorous newspaper column three times a week, and it hadn’t left me with much breath for the great ascent. So I’d moved to another newspaper, where I had to write only one column a week, and cleaned out the type on my typewriter once again.

Nor was it the first book I’d had published – there had already been two selections from the column. It wasn’t even the first novel I’d written. That had been six years earlier, when I was still a reporter. I’d sent it to my newly acquired literary agent, who said she quite liked the first thirty pages, but not the three hundred that followed, which she advised me to put away in a dark place somewhere far from the eyes of man. I had at any rate the good sense to obey, and when I looked at the manuscript again a few years ago I realised that even her cautious approval of the first eleventh of the book had been recklessly soft-hearted.

One of the characters in the story that I now began is also struggling to write his first novel (a boldly original touch, it seemed to me at the time, but I’ve realised since that it’s one quite a lot of first-time novelists resort to). His name is Hugh Rowe, but whether he is the hughrowe of only his own novel, or whether he’s supposed to have some likeness to me I’m not sure. His aims are actually rather higher than mine. He seems to be trying to imitate one or more of the accepted literary forms of the time, whereas I wasn’t venturing all that far from what I’d been doing in my column, with its short takes, broad satire, and staff of simple comic characters.

I recall quite a lot of agonising even so, but I must in fact have done it fairly quickly, because the acceptance from the publishers – the first reference I can find to the book in my files – is dated only eighteen months (and seventy or so weekly columns) later. The advice of my then editor, Richard Ollard (himself a distinguished writer and historian) was pretty much the exact converse of my agent’s about the earlier book – it was the first thirty or so pages that he didn’t like. I was greatly cheered, of course, by this shift in the balance of approval, and was happy to accept his advice to consign those first thirty to the same oblivion as the previous 330.

He had a lot of other good suggestions, too, and I was touched to see, when I looked up the subsequent correspondence in my files just now, that in his letters there are also many comments added in another hand – the early scribblings of my eldest daughter, then aged two, now long since a novelist and screenwriter herself.

*

So, 1965.

T. S. Eliot had died at the beginning of the year and Winston Churchill was just about to. The Beatles were conquering the world, and America was being slowly sucked into Vietnam. Somewhere beyond the headlines computers – the tin men of my title – were beginning to make their importance felt, if only by their ponderous size and cost. They were produced, mostly by IBM, for a small elite of academic and commercial users, and they were as imposing in their way as the great steam engines that had ushered in an earlier technological revolution. There’s a picture on Wikipedia of an IBM 704 mainframe dated 1964. It occu­pies an entire room – four steel cabinets as tall and voluminous as commercial refrigerators, together with a steel desk suite as imposing as the control room of an aircraft-carrier. Amongst it all, easy to overlook surrounded by all that hardware, is a demure young woman in a pencil skirt who is presumably the operator. She seems as overawed as all the rest of us, and as unaware as IBM themselves that in forty or fifty years time the balance of power would have been reversed, and she would be carrying the same capacity and more tucked away unnoticed inside the smartphone in her shirt pocket.

It was mighty IBM mainframes that I envisaged as the equipment of the William Morris Institute of Automation Research, where my story is set. The scale of the hardware seems to have overpowered the judgment of a lot of readers and reviewers, who thought it was the machines and their programmers that I was mocking, whereas I had supposed that my target was the professional people – the journalists, lawyers, clergymen, etc. – whose thinking was so stereotyped that it could be carried out just as effectively by a machine. I hadn’t in those days heard of the Turing Test – Alan Turing’s proposal that a computer could be said to think if its conversational powers were shown to be indistinguishable from a human being’s – so I didn’t realise that what I was suggesting was a kind of converse of it: a demotion of human beings to the status of machines if their intellectual performance was indistinguishable from a computer’s, and they become tin men in their turn.

The William Morris Institute is about to be visited by the Queen for the opening of a new wing, and I realise with hindsight that I’ve used a similar idea quite often since: the grand event that goes wrong, and deposits the protagonists into the humiliating gulf that so often in life opens between intention and achievement. My characters at the Institute could have written a story programme for me and saved me a lot of work. I’ve become a bit of a tin man myself.

*

One of the consequences of reaching the skyline of that first mountain, of course, was the sight of yet another mountain rising beyond – the second novel. It also brought me the Somerset Maugham Award, a travel grant set up by Maugham to encourage writers in the early stages of their careers. In those days it was worth £500, and you had to promise to stay out of the country for three months, ‘with the object of acquainting yourself with the manners and customs of foreign nations.’ Maugham probably saw the likely recipient as a young bachelor, and as spending his exile in some low-wage economy in the Far East where he could have a comfortable life and a few poignant sexual adventures of one sort or another without going beyond his budget. I was married, though, with two small children, and we spent our exile en famille in the United States, so for me it was an expensive benefaction to receive, and offered little opportunity for adventures.

We did find out a bit about local manners and customs, though. One of them was the engaging readiness with which the most ordinary people in the States, not just adventuresses after your winnings in the casino, came up to you on trains and even in the street and told you their life stories in the most intimate detail. ‘Hey, I love kids!’ said an elderly gentleman who happened to be passing somewhere in mid-town Manhattan, at the sight of ours. ‘I’ve just cut my only son out of my will.’ The children themselves made another discovery. Looking upwards at the world from their viewpoint so close to the floor they found an aspect of America that many visitors probably miss – the underside of luncheon counters, which are all decorated with a varicoloured impasto of dried chewing-gum as impressive in its way as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

The book also led to two of the Meetings with Famous Men that make the later stages of a writer’s memoirs so much less enjoyable to read about than Early Struggles. The first was with J. B. Priestley, by then in his seventies, but still perhaps the most successful British writer alive. He summoned me to his impressive country house near Stratford-on-Avon and announced that he wanted to turn my novel into a play. I was flattered, of course, and intrigued. He had recently had a considerable hit with the adaptation that he and Iris Murdoch had made of her novel A Severed Head. I was rather dubious, though, as we talked about it, whether he and I, or he alone, or even both of us in concert with Shakespeare and Chekhov, could achieve the same results with mine. The slightness of characters and plot, and the literary nature of so much of the humour, seemed to me ill-suited for drama. He was a strong-minded man, and he brushed my objections aside like so much fluff. He knew a great deal about the theatre, he said, and I knew nothing. Which I had to admit was true, and I reluctantly agreed to allow him to do a sample first act.

It arrived only a week or so later. I was immediately impressed by the typing, which was flawless and most beautifully formatted, with the dialogue in black and the stage-directions in red – something I had never seen before and never have since. What was typed, though, whether in red or in black, justified all my worst fears. I summoned up my courage and wrote the most tactful letter I could, aborting the whole enterprise and returning his elegant typescript.

It was elegant no longer, I discovered. I had put it on the floor beside my desk while I concentrated on the politeness of my refusal, and my second daughter, aged one, now long since employed in the worlds of broadcasting and publishing, had made her entrance upon the literary stage like her sister before her, not this time by scribbling her comments on the text, but by ripping the pages out of the file one by one, tearing them up, and attempting to eat them. I agreed with her judgment, but I was embarrassed at the frankness with which she had expressed it. I parcelled up the resultant mess as best I could, and added an even more grovelling postscript to my letter. Priestley behaved with the utmost grace, I have to record, both about my rejection of his helping hand and my daughter’s only too eloquent support.

My second meeting, which particularly delighted me because I was a great admirer, was with Kurt Vonnegut. He had reviewed the book in Life magazine, and then, in 1971, when he set up his own film production company on the proceeds from the success of Slaughterhouse-Five, bought the film rights. (He called the company Sourdough, after the old prospectors in the Yukon, because, as he assured me, there was gold in them thar hills.) I went to New York to stay with him and discuss how we were going to do it. I had a delightful few days walking through the baking July streets with him while he recalled bits of the book that had particularly amused him. He was a man who was easily amused, and laughter welled out of him like foam from champagne. He was also a heavy smoker, so that every time he laughed not only did the tears run down his cheeks but he would have to stop in the middle of the sidewalk and double up, coughing and choking, unable to breathe. Several times I feared that his new vocation as movie producer was going to finish him off somewhere along Third Avenue. We couldn’t think of how to make a film out of the material, though, any more than Priestley could a play, and the gold remained, like most of the gold sought by prospectors in the film business, concealed where it was in those tantalising hills.

But at least none of my children offered their assistance, and Kurt and I remained friends for many years. Even after we had lost touch towards the end of his life he evidently retained a touching regard for the book, and in an interview he gave in those last years, where he was talking about the growing difficulties of writing comedy as one got older, I was surprised to read that after The Tin Men I had never been able to write anything funny again. Since he had later come to the first night of Noises Off on Broadway I took this as a considerable testimony to the consistency of his opinions.

Successive publishers in London have kept the book in print, but in America, in spite of Kurt’s support, it has long since vanished. Now, fifty years after the whole adventure started, not to mention ten more novels and sixteen plays, here it comes again – my first published novel, and also, or so Kurt insisted, my last laugh.

Michael Frayn

London, September 2014

1

‘Breadth of vision’ was a peculiarity much recommended at Amalgamated Television, and from the Chairman’s suite in the penthouse on top of Amalgatel House the vision was as broad in every direction as the industrial haze would allow. At the windows of the suite linen slub curtains for ever sunlit by concealed spotlights stirred endlessly in a gentle summer breeze blown by concealed fans, warmed by concealed heaters, and made country fresh by concealed air-conditioners. They brushed with disarming simplicity against low afrormosia benches, on which tropical plants grew, perpetually watered by invisible built-in moisturising systems. On the walls there hung pictures by Pollock, Riopelle, de Staël, Rothko, and the Chairman’s nephew; and in the outer office there sat two Programme Controllers, one Co-ordinating Producer, two Visualisation Directors, and three Programme Co-ordination Visualisers, who had been summoned for an urgent conference with the Chairman two and a half hours previously, and who had been sitting waiting ever since, at a total labour cost to the Chairman and his fellow shareholders of £24 an hour.

The Chairman was in conference. The fact was announced all over Amalgatel House on little lighted screens. ‘R.V. in conference,’ they glowed, wherever men’s heads might be lifted up to appreciate the news, in lobby, garage, and canteen. One shone in the Chairman’s waiting-room, for the benefit of the assembled surtax payers. The Chairman’s secretary emerged from her office and examined them all for the sixth time with a certain suppressed satisfaction.

‘I’ll go in again and remind R.V. you’re here,’ she said kindly.

She knocked softly on the Chairman’s door and went in. Rother­mere Vulgurian was striding slowly round the room, his hands behind his back, the summer sunlight from the windows glinting softly on his distinguished silver hair.

‘R.V.,’ she said. Without looking at her, Mr. Vulgurian detached a hand from behind his back and waved her out of the room. He was in conference with Sir Prestwick Wining, a working member of the Amalgamated Television Board who was responsible for the public, human and cultural relations side. Sir Prestwick, a small, sad, inert man, sat in a deeply-padded swivel chair in the middle of the room, turning slowly round and round like a sunflower to keep his face towards the Chairman.

Mr. Vulgurian stopped to pick absent-mindedly at the impasto on a Pollock.

‘And another thing,’ he said. ‘Who’s producing It’s a Giggle now?’

‘Corbishley,’ said Sir Prestwick.

‘Ah. I want you to go to our friend Corbishley and tell him that Lord Wastwater went on that programme last night with his tie under one ear.’

‘I’ll tell him, R.V.’