As a twelve-year-old Boy Scout and altar boy, I always brought my gun to church. After murmuring my responses in the Latin mass, gleeful when I heard the ‘Ite, missa est,’ I hurried to the nearby woods to blast away at beer cans or paper targets. Father Burns sighed whenever he saw me stowing my bolt-action Mossberg .22 calibre rifle in my locker and slipping on my cassock and surplice. But he accepted it, because I was in the church-sponsored Boy Scouts, Troop 25, which gathered weekly at the parish hall.
A traditional altar boy rule deemed that if you served at three funerals (always a mournful experience as a candle bearer among sobbing mourners and a smoky thurible), you got a wedding. A wedding meant a high mass and a tip, maybe five dollars, from the bride’s father. After I’d done three funerals I was denied a wedding by Father Burns (was it my gun?), so I quit the altar boys and instead of going to mass went directly to the woods and became single-minded about shooting – a trigger-happy infidel.
Now and then I would take the bus to shoot at a distant quarry with other Scouts, who also had rifles. When we boarded the bus, the driver would say, ‘Take them bolts out and stick them in your pocket,’ and send us to the back of the bus, where we sat, rifles upright. I was to see such passengers much later, boys and men with rifles, on buses in Afghanistan.
I’ve owned guns of various sorts ever since. In the years I lived in London, a proper handgun was unobtainable, but I always had an air pistol. Target practice in my South London garden amused my neighbours, Timothy West and Prunella Scales. ‘Don’t shoot the cat!’
Hunting seems to me cruel, but in Hawaii I have an AK-47 for shooting wild pigs that arrive in sounders of eight or more to menace me and my geese. My neighbours help with skinning and gutting them, and I give them half the meat. Seeing my serious Chinese-made firearm, Haruki Murakami once said to me: ‘You’re the only writer I know who has a gun.’ But Hemingway had lots of hunting rifles and William Burroughs owned pistols. Hunter S. Thompson, who had a large gun collection, said: ‘I don’t consider them weapons … as much as tools, or toys.’ Each of those men used his gun violently. Hemingway killed himself with a favourite shotgun; Thompson did the same (while on the phone with his wife) using his prized .45 calibre pistol; and Burroughs, who fancied himself a crack shot, aimed for a drinking glass on his wife’s head in a ‘William Tell’ charade in Mexico and shot her in the face, killing her. In Qu’est-ce que la littérature, Jean-Paul Sartre quotes Brice Parain – ‘Les mots sont des pistolets chargés’ – which strikes me as risible hyperbole for someone who, though he was a conscript, never fired a pistol. (Sartre served as a wall-eyed meteorologist in the French army.)
The most muddled and disputed handgun episode in modern literary history is the Russian roulette story that Graham Greene told, and retold, to friends and explained in his memoir A Sort of Life. The gun belonged to his brother Raymond. It was a revolver, ‘a small lady-like object with six chambers like a tiny egg-stand’. As for the ‘cardboard box full of bullets’, Raymond later denied there was such a box of ammo. Greene said he put a cartridge into the cylinder, spun it behind his back, aimed the gun at his head and pulled the trigger. Click.
One of Greene’s biographers (Norman Sherry) dates this attempt to July 1924; a more recent biographer (Richard Greene) writes: ‘By Christmas 1923, after a total of six plays, he gave up Russian roulette.’ A poem Greene wrote about it, ‘The Gamble’ (‘I slip a charge into one chamber’), appeared in his collection Babbling April, in 1925. Another of his poems, ‘Sensations’, suggests he was shooting blanks, or perhaps the chambers were empty and he was fantasising. Sherry: ‘What strikes one as strange is the reason Greene gives for attempting suicide: boredom, it seems.’ Greene: ‘This is one of the most famous episodes in Graham Greene’s life. However, it may not be entirely true.’ What has not been questioned by anyone but is vividly absurd to me is ‘the small lady-like’ revolver with the ‘tiny egg-stand’ chambers – he means the cylinder. It seems unlikely that anyone serious about playing Russian roulette would employ in the attempt such a tinky-winky Roscoe.
In the last paragraph of J.D. Salinger’s story ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’, the suicidal main character Seymour Glass, on holiday in Florida with his young wife, shoots himself in the head with (Salinger specifies) ‘an Ortgies 7.65 automatic’. That’s inaccurate. An Ortgies is not an automatic but rather a German semi-automatic pistol. (Hitler presented an Ortgies to Eva Braun, with her name engraved in gold on its side.) It so happens I own an Ortgies handgun, not an ideal calibre for a suicide, much more likely to put you in a wheelchair than a coffin. A broomhandle Mauser’s heavier bullet would work better for a coup de grâce. I also own a C96 broomhandle Mauser, an ingeniously designed firearm that first appeared in the 1890s. This large squarish pistol, when removed from its curvaceous wooden case, is slotted into the end of the case, which serves as a gunstock – an instant rifle. T.E. Lawrence had one, as did Winston Churchill.
There are said to be almost half a billion firearms in the United States. This works out at more than one gun per person. But if you ask an American how many guns he or she owns, chances are they will say either ‘none’ or ‘many’. When I was travelling in the Southern states for my book Deep South, I asked a man what kind of gun he had, and he laughed. ‘I got 45 guns!’
I have about fifteen: the AK for disposing of wild pigs, five or so for target shooting, and the rest as collectors’ items – the Mauser, the Ortgies and others. I also have a tiny, century-old Webley & Scott vest-pocket .25 calibre pistol and a 9 mm German Luger from the First World War, all of them still shootable. Some of these guns I picked up at gun shows in the American South, where in a private sale it’s possible to buy any gun without papers or permission – a system open to serious abuse.
All of this gun talk may sound shocking to someone in a country where firearms are restricted, who might ask, ‘What’s your problem?’ But gun ownership is protected by the US constitution and the National Rifle Association gives tens of millions of dollars to politicians to keep the gun laws as slack as possible. The laws differ from state to state: some states such as Mississippi, Arizona and Wyoming have few regulations, and no requirement for background checks, and openly carrying a firearm is quite common. Where I live it’s impossible to buy a gun without a permit. This means being interviewed at the local police station as well as being fingerprinted and subjected to an intensive background check.
Apart from dispatching feral pigs, I continue to shoot at a range, about a hundred and fifty or two hundred rounds at a time, trying for a close grouping in the bull’s-eye. A gunshot is very loud, so noise-cancelling headphones are required at ranges. I often listen to opera while shooting. The music of Philip Glass is also a great accompaniment to the rat-tat-tat of an AK-47 or the whizz-bang of a Luger.
Target shooting at a range is no more dangerous, and slightly less complicated, than bar billiards, shove ha’penny or darts. And because of the headphones it’s completely absorbing and strangely calming. Ammunition is expensive – for some high calibre guns, as much as a dollar a cartridge. Shooting demands such concentration that it seems to me the perfect recreation for a writer, a relief from sitting at a desk and – as I am doing now – trying to imagine the next sentence. There may be other writers who wish also to be an expert marksman, but I don’t know of any. Murakami runs marathons; Joyce Carol Oates is also a runner; John Irving wrestles when he isn’t writing. Iris Murdoch often went swimming for pleasure; Nabokov chased butterflies; Graham Greene chased women. Hemingway’s idea of fun was killing big animals in Africa, but when he writes about hunting, always with macho enthusiasm, he sounds sententious and grim.
It is possible to be a mild, peace-loving citizen and enjoy target shooting. My gun permit allows me to carry a pistol but I never do, because a gun exposed to the public gaze is often a magnet for violence. I feel sure that smouldering in the heart of most male American gun owners is the belief that, when the occasion arises, he will spring into action by plugging a miscreant and thus heroically avert a catastrophe. Yet this seldom happens. Travelling in Canada recently, I asked a woman what she took to be a difference between Americans and Canadians. She said: ‘Americans are a fearful people. That’s why they have so many guns. They’re afraid. But what are they afraid of?’ They’re afraid of other people with guns, of course.
Target shooting is an activity practised mainly in the US, and we excel at Olympic shooting, though India – a country that seldom wins Olympic medals – has distinguished itself in competitive airgun events (seven medals altogether, including a gold). A top shooter can be elderly, male or female, with a gimpy leg, asthmatic or morbidly obese. I like to think that 73 years of practising might qualify me for a slot on the US Olympic team, and perhaps a medal. It would be quite something to beat the record (and I am in a position to do so) of the heavily bearded Oscar Swahn, the oldest person ever to compete – he was 72 in the 1920 Antwerp Olympics – and the oldest ever to win a gold medal. He represented Sweden as a shooter in three Olympics. And he was an author, of Om Betydelsen af Herbarts Philosophiska Standpunkt (1864), another trigger-happy writer.