Despite receiving a string of rejection letters, the first at the age of 12, novelist Stephen Benatar persevered, and eventually the marketing techniques he'd learned as a cleaning product salesman paid off. It only took 30 years, he told Cosmo Landesman
I first met Stephen Benatar in a Waterstonc's bookstore in north London. This well- dressed man in a fedora came up to me and said very softly: "Hello, I'm signing copies of my novel. Would you be so kind as to take a look?" And before I could say: "No, bugger off!", he had slipped a copy of Wish Her Safe at Home into my hands and disappeared. "Oh dear," I thought, "another one of Brit-lit's deluded losers!" I've met so many in my time - writers who have measured out their lives in rejection slips; who have written dozens of well-reviewed novels that sank without trace. So I bought the book in much the same spirit as I would buy a copy of The Big Issue: it was a pity purchase.
It just goes to show that you should never judge an author by their hat or their hustle. For I quickly discovered that Benatar is not one of the deluded; he is one of the talented. He writes wonderfully about failed lives, missed opportunities and the seductive dreams of second chances. Benatar's terrain, writes the academic Gillian Carey, is "the weird hinterland of ordinary life
where eccentricity shades into the bizarre, battiness into delusion and dementia". Wish Her Safe at Home is a haunting story about a genteel woman called Rachel Waring who inherits a Georgian house in
Bristol and slowly goes mad. Professor John Carey, an esteemed reviewer for The Sunday Times, has called it a "masterpiece". Doris Lessing has praised it as "a most original and surprising novel". And various celebrities - Emma Thompson, Joan Bakewell and Joanna Lumley - have declared themselves fans.
Now, after 30 years of obscurity, Benatar is on the brink of a breakthrough. The New York Review of Books has published Wish Her Safe at Home in its Modern Classics series in the US, and is now issuing a British edition. And yet Benatar is still engaged in a one-man crusade to find readers for his books, approaching strangers and asking them would they "care to look at this". A neat, well-preserved man of 73, Benatar has a whiff of old-world civility that comes off him like cologne. Talking to him is like taking tea with a vicar; you feel you had better not swear. But once he starts to tell me about the various "dalliances" he had with men during his marriage, I relax.
The odd thing about Benatar is that he has the shameless, steely determination of a hustler, but the courteous good manners of a gentleman. I le is former umbrclki salesman, English teacher (at the University of Bordeaux) and successful rep for the "miracle" cleaning product Swipe - and he has been doing his own peculiar form of book signings for the past 25 years. And not just in bookstores. He has approached strangers on buses; he has
knocked on the doors of neighbours; he has invaded pubs, betting shops, estate agents and even the local undertaker.
So why does he do it? It's not for the money. He earns roughly £l for each copy of a book he sells. He's not in it for the fame. "No, I have no desire to be recognised on the streets," he says. He does it for one simple reason: he wants to be read. "I know some people might think that I'm shameless, a bit too pushy, bin whai are you supposed to do? Nobody knows who I am. If I didn't go out there and promote my books, they'd just... die. My greatest fear is that my life's
work will just vanish. I want to he road in the future in the same way that I read Jane Austen today."
High hopes, dead novels, cruel rejection slips, good reviews and bad sales - Benatar has known the lot. All over Britain there are Benatars - men and women who, despite critical indifference and
the UK can't make a living at it (the average income was £12,330 for the good year of 2004-05). They will watch their careers and dreams crash and burn or just slowly crumble with age.
Faced with such failure, some writers turn to drink, while others - such as John Kennedy Toole, the author of the posthumously published, Pulitzer-prize-winning A Confederacy of Dunces - choose suicide. But not Benatar. This is a man who for over a quarter of a century looked literary failure in the face - and then decided to fight back. He got his first rejection in 1949 at the age of 12 when he sent a short story to the London Evening Standard. At 19 he had his first novel, A Beacon in the Mist, rejected. Over the next two decades Benatar wrote 11 novels. He sent them in to publishers, and they sent them back with a curt "Thank you, but..." or "Not one for us". By 1980, Benatar, who was by then married with four children and teaching English to support his family, decided that if he couldn't find a publisher for his latest novel. The Man on the Bridge, he would pack it in. It is set in London in the 1950s and tells the story of an ambitious young man on the make who realises that he is gay and has an affair with a rich and fashionable gay painter.
Since he didn't have an agent, Benatar's family all prayed to God to find a publisher for Dad's novel. Well, He must truly move in a mysterious way, because that's what happened. The novel was
plucked from a slush pile at Harvester, who decided to publish it and, what's more, gave Benatar the legendary Catharine Carver - who was Saul Bellow's editor - to help get it in shape. By now, Benatar was 44. "It was so exciting. When I got the news, I went weak at the knees. I really believed that my career was about to take off. I even sent a copy of the book to Clint Eastwood for him to make into a film. He would have been perfect as the gay painter, but for some reason I never heard from him."
So what happened next? "Oh, not much. A few good reviews, but it didn't sell well. But by then I'd finished my next novel. Wish Her Safe at Home." With its publication in 19X2 by The Bodley Head, it really did seem that Benatar was on his way. The novel had wonderful reviews and was the runner-up for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Then, again, nothing. The family stopped praying. The rejection slips kept coming. By the end of the 1980s Benatar had written 15 novels - but only four were published.
Then he wrote Such Men Are Dangerous, and nobody wanted it, so he did something extraordinary: he persuaded his local council - Scunthorpe - to publish it. A local Tory councillor protested: "It's the duty of the council to dispose of rubbish - not publish it!"
I ask Benatar if he was downhearted during this period. "No, I never felt downhearted about the failure of any of my books. I have wondered why they haven't been taken up by readers. The thing is, I love to write." For decades he has had to watch many writers with far less ability than his own rise effortlessly to the top. Yet he shows no trace of resentment. "No, I don't feel any bitterness or envy of successful authors. Honest. People like Ian McEwan, I don't envy him because I don't rate his work."
The 1990s proved a tough time for Benatar. His marriage of 29 years ended when he decided to come out as gay - though he insists that he had told his wife, Eileen, of his gayness before they married. She has a different version of events: "I think there was a misunderstanding. I was rather naive and thought he had a few schoolboy crushes on men. I didn't think he was fully gay."
Then, in 2007, Benatar tried to get Wish Her Safe at Home republished as a Penguin Classic. They were interested but asked if he could get someone famous to write an introduction. So Benatar got John Carey to write a glowing introduction - yet still Penguin turned him down, and so did 36 other publishers. It is at this point that most writers would just quit. But Benatar decided to set up his own imprint - Welbeck Classics - to republish his books, and to take on the task of selling them himself. In 2007 he printed 4,000 copies of Wish Her Safe at Home, and he has sold them all personally. Bookstore managers
who have seen Benatar in action arc astounded by his success. Andrew Raymond from Waters tone's in Staines says: "He has a charismatic presence that people like. He sells around 50 books every time he comes in, which is a fantastic achievement for an unknown author." "My record is 128 books in one day," says Benatar proudly. "I actually outsold J.K. Rowling and John Grisham that day. But then, I was there, and they weren't."
Central to Bcnatar's appeal is the fact that people feci that they have actually met the author, because he talks to them, not only about his book but about their lives. Usually you wait in a queue to have your book signed, exchange a few words with the Circat One - and off you go. Benatar knows that to sell his book he has to sell himself, and it works. As one woman wrote in an online discussion: "Last week I bought a book in Harrods and met the author - what a lovely man! Very charming and beautifully dressed - you have to admire a man in a neckerchief."
"I'm very careful not to hassle anybody,*' he tells me. "I always give them my book and quickly walk away so they don't feel there's any pressure or they're being watched." Various celebrities have been subject to the Benatar soft sell. He slipped his novel through the letterboxes of Hmma Thompson ("she was terribly nice and wrote me a lovely note") and Doris Lessing ("so very kind with her praise").
Benatar finally got his lucky break last year. I le had held a party at a bookshop and the next day he went back to pick up some leftover wine. "As I was pushing a trolley of wine, a man came in the shop and I ran into him," he says. "So I apologised and said: 'Would you mind having a look at my book while you're here?'" It turned out that the man was Edwin Franks, the managing editor of the publishing section of The New York Review of Books. He bought a copy of Wish Her Safe at Home. "I read the book straight away and was knocked out. It's not every day you find a neglected classic from an Englishman who is still alive. Everyone in the office read it and was just as excited as I was." A few weeks later, Benatar got the news for which he had been waiting for nearly two decades: a prestigious publisher wanted to publish his book both here and in America. Now The New York Review of Books has whisked Benatar off to New York to do readings and to try his brand of self-promotion on the Americans.
Rachel Waring, the loopy heroine of Wish Her Safe at Home, says at one point: "Wouldn't it be fine if we all had second chances?" Benatar's work illustrates the poignancy of that impossible dream; but paradoxically his life teaches a very different lesson: don't let your dream die. One day it might just come true.
