First books and other pleasures

Here's an adapted version of a piece that I wrote nearly three years ago:

I was twenty-nine before I went to university. In my late teens and early twenties, I was in a band – I was fiercely in a band, the way that some people are helplessly tangled up in a relationship – and then, afterwards, I drifted into pub work. It was only when I found myself becalmed in a proof-reading office that I decided that it was time to go back and do what I should have done when I was younger.

I don't regret any of it – not the years when we were so very much under the radar that it would be a compliment to say that we were "in obscurity", not the heroic drinking (it was, I like to think, my five-year lost weekend) nor any of the jobs, pretty much all of them behind a counter, which did at least provide a frisson of excitement (I was robbed four times) – but I was aware, for all those years, of what was less an itch than a kind of unvoiced keening. My long-suffering wife, Naomi, once told me that I had to stop saying that I could have gone to Oxford, mostly because my daughter is at Oxford. It's hers, she says, which it is, and she's made a very decent fist of it. It's true, too, that when I'm there, among all of those slightly unreal-looking streets, I think: Nah. I could never have done it. I wrote a poem, once, which describes my younger self as being "ravenous as a rat" and it's him that I visualise. Perhaps I don't mean "visualise"; perhaps I mean that I still feel him, somewhere in my gut – that person who, in the words of Les Murray, was "small" and "wild" "with no idea of peace". Whoever he thinks he is, he's still in there somewhere, resentful, chippy and spoiling for a fight, albeit a verbal one. He would never have fitted in. Or, to put it more accurately, he would have made sure that he didn't. So, no, I couldn't have gone. (Naomi puts it more simply. "You didn't," she says.) But it was mooted by my teachers, and it always rankled. When I used to clean the pipes behind the bar, I read Anna Karenina. When I visited Oxford, I allowed myself to visualise a life in a pub there. I saw myself as a preternaturally literate barman, throwing quotes over my shoulder at smiling undergraduates.

Sad, no? And I'm pleased to say that my degree purged me of all this nonsense. Is a Jude the Obscure Complex an actual thing? If so, I definitely had it. Now, though, I haven't. I'm at peace. I don't yearn for the ineffable or the invisible any more.

I was reminded of all of this when I received the proof copy of my first book of poems. It's called A Brief and Biased History of Love, it was published by Culture Matters and it remains one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. There's a terrific photo on the front, courtesy of my friend Richard Helyar, and Mike at Culture Matters did a lovely job of designing it. But, of course, that isn't what I mean. There they are, my poems, between the covers of a book. Between the covers of a book, moreover, that includes an introduction by Fran Lock. Before it came out, I wrote that:

"My poetry book is due out very soon, and I know that, on the day that I receive my personal copies, I will feel as though this ought to be a moment of great significance. I phrase it in this way because I suspect that I'm in danger of telling myself this so often that the moment itself will pass almost without me knowing it. Or feeling it, at least. It will feel significant in the way that Christopher Isherwood wrote that most of life can feel symbolic: you're so busy giving it meaning that you forget to grasp what it really is."

But it didn't, and I didn't. There it was, a physical fact, and again what I felt was this: at peace. I need to unpack this, I think. First, it's important to understand that I was sixty years of age and had wanted to publish a book for as long as I can remember. It was, the moment when I held it, both everything I wanted it to be and nothing like what I expected. I was expecting, I don't know, a lot of excitement – febrile excitement, sure, but excitement nonetheless – or else its opposite: a slight feeling of "So what?" Or maybe something that wasn't that definite. Something like: "What do I do now?" I'd yearned for it for so long that I thought that all that yearning would, somehow, short-circuit my immediate response; that it would clot it or colour it or spoil it. Because what could possibly measure up? Well, the book did. The thing is so very undeniable; so very present in your hands. It's the real thing, not something hanging there, elusive and, yes, ineffable, in my imagination. All I could really think, for about a day, was: "Hello."

And you know what? It's enough. Naomi took me to Hazlitts, a hotel on Frith Street that will accept your first edition and then place it in a bookcase for you. It was one of the things I have always wanted to do. It was always supposed to be a moment of validation and, yes, to be honest, it was. For one thing, the hotel itself is gorgeous. The room sloped upwards from the four poster bed towards a bathroom that included one of those baths you see in a Heath Robinson drawing. The thing was huge. Definitively huge: a visible signifier, if only for one night. Outside you could hear the sound of Soho, which, as I'm sure you're all aware, is London but in italics. (And I do love italics, me.)

So, yes, it was a great experience. Just as my first festival was and my appearance on BBC Radio to talk about my novel, The Sparkler, or being interviewed by Professor Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in The Dickens Museum. But you know what? What the book made me realise is that the book itself is the thing. All of those questions: Who will read me? Who will want to buy me? Who can I get to review me? Can I enter it for prizes? Will people laugh at me if I do? Will the sales be on a list somewhere, like a record on the charts? What will they be like? Exemplary? Derisory? None of this feels as important as it used to do. I have a book coming out in September. I will very much want to be (I can't help being) "active", as my publisher, the lovely and very efficient Vine Leaves Press, described it to me. I will do everything I can to get it out there. I will post like mad. I will seek reviews. I will proclaim it from the equivalent of the rooftops. But if nothing happens? If I get resoundingly ignored? I will feel put out. But it won't, in the words of Seamus Heaney, be a "killing wound". Because I will have published two novels and two books of poetry. And the thing I know now - that I really know - is that nothing, not even a ravening rat, can take that away from you.

Alan Humm is the editor of One Hand Clapping. You can find his novel, The Sparkler, here and his books of poems here and here. His second novel, Rough Music, is coming out in September.