The Salmon of Doubt

‘fan base’, if I can use so revolting a phrase. When you look at Velazquez, listen to Mozart, read Dickens or laugh at Billy Connolly, to take four names at random (it always takes a great deal of time and thought to take names at random for the purposes of argument), you are aware that what they do they do for the world and the results are, of course, magnificent. When you look at Blake, listen to Bach, read Douglas Adams or watch Eddie Izzard perform, you feel you are perhaps the only person in the world who really gets them. Just about everyone else admires them, of course, but no one really connects with them in the way you do. I advance this as a theory. Douglas’s work is not the high art of Bach or the intense personal cosmos of Blake, it goes without saying, but I believe my view holds nonetheless. It’s like falling in love. When an especially peachy Adams turn of phrase or epithet enters the eye and penetrates the brain you want to tap the shoulder of the nearest stranger and share it. The stranger might laugh and seem to enjoy the writing, but you hug to yourself the thought that they didn’t quite understand its force and quality the way you do – just as your friends (thank heavens) don’t also fall in love with the person you are going on and on about to them.

The bottom drawer of recently deceased writers is often best left firmly locked and bolted: in the case of Douglas, I am sure you will agree, the bottom drawer (or in his case the nested sub-folders of his hard drive) has been triumphantly well worth the prising open. Chris Ogle, Peter Guzzardi, Douglas’s wife Jane and his assistant Sophie Astin have done a wonderful job. A Douglas-less world is much less pleasant than a Douglas-full world, but the leaping of The Salmon of Doubt helps put off the full melancholy of his sudden departure.

Stephen Fry Peru JANUARY 2002

LIFE Dear Editor, The sweat was dripping down my face and into my lap, making my clothes very wet and sticky. I sat there, 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 of anxiety. Suddenly, the slot opened and in dropped the mail. I grabbed at my Eagle and ripped off the wrapping paper. My ordeal was over for another week!

D. D.

JANUARY 23, 1965, Eagle and Boys’ World Magazine

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[Editor’s Note: In the sixties The Eagle was an enormously popular English science-fiction magazine.

This letter is the first known published work of Douglas Adams, then age twelve.]

The Voices of All Our Yesterdays I vaguely remember my schooldays. They were what was going on in the background while I was trying to listen to the Beatles.

When “Can’t Buy Me Love” came out, I was twelve. I sneaked out of school during morning milk break, bought the record, and broke into matron’s room because she had a record player. Then I played it, not loud enough to get caught, but just loud enough to hear with my ear pressed up against the speaker. Then I played it again for the other ear. Then I turned the record over and did the same for

“You Can’t Do That.” That was when the housemaster found me and put me into detention, which is what I had expected. It seemed a small price to pay for what I now realize was art.

I didn’t know it was art then, of course. I only knew that the Beatles were the most exciting thing in the universe. It wasn’t always an easy view to live with. First you had to fight the Stones fans, which was tricky because they fought dirty and had their knuckles nearer the ground. Then you had to fight the grownups, parents and teachers who said that you were wasting your time and pocket money on rubbish that you would have forgotten by next week. I found it hard to understand why they were telling me this.

I sang in the school choir and knew how to listen for harmony and counterpoint, and it was clear to me that the Beatles were something extraordinarily clever. It bewildered me that no one else could hear it: impossible harmonies and part playing you had never heard in pop songs before. The Beatles were obviously just putting all this stuff in for some secret fun of their own, and it seemed exciting to me that people could have fun in that way.

The next exciting thing was that they kept on losing me. They would bring out a new album and for a few listenings it would leave me cold and confused. Then gradually it would begin to unravel itself in my mind.