RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

158 | denis beckett
foremost of my well-rehearsed profundities(?) about Godot. I
was half-way through the sentence when he said: “Oh dear, I
hope you’re not going to talk about Godot. a person moves on,
you know. Godot is gone.” So much for my careful preparation,
but I got to know what he meant.
My first book, Permanent Peace, wasn’t a Godot, but it was
the best that I could do in 1985. after fallacy, three years later,
my heart sank on the infrequent occasions when somebody
phoned or wrote with queries arising from Permanent Peace. It
had come to seem uncooked, unpolished. That was in 1985. In
1990 I wrote, “My heart sinks on the infrequent occasions when
somebody phones to say he’s been reading Permanent Peace
and to raise queries arising from it. It seems so rudimentary
now.”
It was a financial disaster, too. I printed 1,000 copies, which
sold out in short order. Then I printed 500 more, making the total
outlay twice as much as it would have been if I’d done the whole
1,500 in one go. These sold out, too, and so, twice bitten and once
shy, I did a third print of 2,500, of which 2,200 ended as pulp.
The logic was that since no-one was taking up an argument
which appeared in dribs and drabs in a magazine, do a book and
get it reviewed. It half worked. Permanent Peace’s first review
was in Finance Week, by Geoff Shuttleworth, who later went to
australia. It qualified as a rave even though the printed version
was less of a rave than the original. I bumped into the editor,
allan Greenblo, the day before it appeared. “Boy!” he said, “are
we giving you a punt tomorrow! Shuttleworth went bananas, I
had to tone him down.” I threw him a mock punch and said I’d
bet nobody was toning the bad reviews up. If I’d known then
what I was soon to learn, it would have been a real punch.
Harvey Tyson in The Star and aggrey Klaaste in the Sowetan
followed up with what were perhaps semi-raves, or at least
demi-semi-raves, in their own ways. I thought the ball was
getting rolling at last, but that was as far as it rolled. Next was a
historian from ucT, colin Bundy, in the Weekly Mail, saying in
effect: here’s a good laugh.