An Artist of World Renown Looks Back on his Obscure Beginnings

Now that I am at long last on the verge of the Big Time and due at any moment to become a household name, I can afford to look back with a certain degree of detachment, and even serenity, on those difficult years when no-one had even heard of me. If anyone had told me then - and you must remember I'm talking about the period stretching roughly from 1960 to the present day - that I would one day win the Booker Prize, not to mention the Nobel Prize for Literature, I think I would have laughed in their face! I am not ashamed to confess now that there were many times in what I now look back upon as my formative years when I felt like throwing up the whole thing, or just throwing up. But perhaps even then I sensed that adversity was in some sense hardening and shaping me and that the constant rebuffs were in fact sent to test me.

I think that all creative artists benefit from a period in the wilderness, and I well remember Orson Welles telling me (and several others present) that he himself had started his career at the top and then worked his way down. Early success is one of the worst things that can happen to us creative artists, and that is why I am so thankful that the Campbell Soup venture did not come off...

In the late sixties, Andy Warhol and I were busy working on a new approach to painting involving the use of what later came to be known as the photographic technique. Andy and I had hit upon the idea of photographing the subject we wished to paint and then, in layman's language, to sort of rough it up so that it had an artistic look about it. Andy decided to try out this exciting new approach on Campbell's Tomato Soup whereas I, for reasons which now escape me, opted for the Mulligatawny. Andy was the first to hit the art galleries and his work was hailed as a stroke of artistic genius of the first order. Barely a week later, my own offering was dismissed as a work of cheap imitation showing none of the creative flair of the Warhol original.

I didn't begrudge Andy his success, but we were never really close after this incident. However, I always retained a certain sneaking admiration for his business acumen if not his hugely overrated artistic talent. I used to say that he had more talent in his whole body than I did in my little finger...