Work in Progress

by Paul Thomas

  I guess I am. We go inside. Greybeard shoots another roll of film (Max relaxed, Max studious, Max brooding, Max sincerely hoping he doesn’t come across as a poster boy for the dirty raincoat brigade) before heading off to another job. Julie presses record and asks me to begin at the beginning. I give a breezy, unembarrassed account, starting with Candy and embellished only by having Walter bet me that I couldn’t write a publishable porn novel in eighty days.

  Julie laughs in all the right places. When I finish she asks what differentiates erotica from pornography.

  ‘A certain sickly style,’ I say. ‘Some pretentious navel-gazing on the theme of self-discovery and liberation from the constraints of bourgeois morality. The writer’s conviction that the work has literary merit.’

  ‘Tania reckoned you really rated Submission. “Completely blown away” were her exact words.’

  ‘What else did she say?’

  Julie hesitates.

  ‘Come on, if she slagged me off, it’s only fair that I have the right of reply. Besides, you might have a good old book-scene bitch-fight on your hands.’

  She turns off the tape recorder. ‘Her basic take is that she’s creating art; you churned out jerk-off fantasies for sickos. Writing porn was a symptom of your creative decline, which she tried to help you out of but you wouldn’t help yourself. She canned the relationship because she didn’t want to get dragged down by your negative energy. Not that it will appear in print but she doesn’t see your story having a happy ending. I was talking about it with our books editor and, for what it’s worth, she thinks Tania’s full of shit.’

  I take Julie into the study and turn on the computer. After showing her the last modified date on my review of Submission, I print it off.

  ‘Feel free to check the dates with Tania,’ I say, ‘but I wrote this before I met her, not after we broke up.’

  twenty

  BATTLE OF THE EXES

  When writers who once were lovers lock horns over sex in fiction, little is left to the imagination.

  JULIE ASHFORD reports.

  They made an odd couple but for a few months their relationship was the talk of the local literary scene.

  After two decades as one of New Zealand literature’s least homesick expatriates, Max Napier came home to a muted welcome. The author of twelve novels, including In the Midst of Life, Road to Nowhere and The First Casualty, he’s built up a solid rather than stellar reputation. However, his recent output has left the critics noticeably underwhelmed and the former Young Turk, who recently turned 50, seems at risk of becoming the Nearly Man.

  Tania Sterling, 29, is the hottest item in New Zealand literature in more ways than one. Her debut novel, Submission, has reportedly sold almost 20,000 copies in less than a year, an unheard-of figure for local fiction, and is into its fourth reprint. Given the similarities between the main character and the author, this steamy story of a young woman’s sexual odyssey is widely assumed to be semi-autobiographical.

  Sterling hasn’t exactly gone out of her way to discourage this speculation. Her interviews read like a script conference for Sex and the City, and she has loved and left a number of well-known men, most recently model-about-town Marcus Grey.

  Whether or not Sterling really is as uninhibited as her heroine, there’s no doubt she’s a shrewd and energetic self-promoter.

  ‘Right from the get-go, Tania understood that writing the book is only half the battle,’ says her agent, Celia Sheridan. ‘Once it’s written, you’ve then got to sell it. Fiction’s a hard sell because, as a society, we’re increasingly focused on so-called reality and you can’t market a novel under a convenient, unambiguous label like sport or cooking or travel.

  ‘But the public and media need something they can get their teeth into and that pretty much has to be the author. Tania’s a publisher’s dream: she’s beautiful, raunchy and outrageous, she understands that she’s got to sell herself and she goes about it with the same single-mindedness and perfectionism that she brings to her writing.’

  The two writers met last December at a publisher’s Christmas party and embarked on what was, by all accounts, a passionate affair. According to a fellow writer who prefers to remain nameless, ‘Whenever you saw them, they were all over each other. It was a bit much really.’

  Despite Sterling’s avowed preference for short, intense affairs, some observers got the impression that this was serious.

  ‘To hear her tell it, it was Soul Mate City,’ says another fixture on the literary scene. ‘You got the feeling she saw herself and Max as like the first couple of NZ lit.’

  But within three months it was all over. While Napier declined to discuss the circumstances of their split, Sterling is typically candid. She puts it down to them being in very different phases of their career.

  ‘I get up in the morning, have breakfast and go to the computer,’ she says. ‘Once I’m at it, I resent any and every interruption or distraction. With Max, it was like he only got down to work when he’d exhausted all other possibilities.

  ‘I wouldn’t go as far as to say he was jealous of my success but he must’ve been uncomfortably aware that I’m much more passionate about writing and being a writer than he is. I probably reminded him of what he was like twenty years ago, which must’ve been a bitter-sweet thought.’

  The pair haven’t exchanged a word since their break-up, and things went from bad to worse this week when it emerged that in the late 1990s Napier virtually abandoned his calling to churn out pornographic novels for an American adult entertainment company.

  Despite Submission’s X-rated content, Sterling professes to be outraged: ‘Pornography’s the absolute antithesis of what I’m about. It’s the polar opposite of literature.’

  If she’d known about it, she ‘wouldn’t have had a bar of him. It’s completely offensive to me, both as a woman and a serious writer.’

  And even though she was ‘gobsmacked’ by the revelation, with the benefit of hindsight she sees ‘a certain twisted logic’.

  ‘Quite clearly Max lost confidence in himself and his work some time ago,’ she says. ‘I could speculate on the reasons for that but it’s probably best not to. Let’s just say you don’t produce masterpieces with a hangover. When you’re in that place, writing porn makes sense in a horrible kind of way because it’s a denial of art and therefore an acknowledgement that you haven’t got what it takes, in terms of talent or sensitivity or dedication, to be an artist.’

  Not surprisingly, Napier sees it in less dramatic — and damning — terms. ‘When I was living in Sydney, I met this American guy at a party. He was in the porn business and, after a certain amount of bourbon-fuelled banter, he bet me that I couldn’t write a publishable porn novel in 80 days.

  ‘I won the bet. He was so taken with my effort that he prevailed on me to do more. I was between projects, as they say. I wouldn’t call it my finest hour but I don’t propose to lock myself in the library with a revolver.’

  Typically disarming, but not the whole story. Napier concealed his sideline — and the earnings it generated — from his then wife, Sydney journalist Kate O’Toole. His explanation: ‘It just never seemed to be the right time.’

  ‘I found out I was married to a sleaze,’ said O’Toole from Sydney this week. ‘It’s an unpleasant discovery and I wouldn’t wish it on any woman. What you do is immediately change the locks and call a lawyer.’

  Once again, Napier declines to comment. ‘Publicly airing the soiled sheets of a failed relationship is a bit like suicide bombing,’ he says. ‘You tend to come out of it as badly as your target.’

  The manner in which Napier’s secret life as a porn writer came to light is a story in itself and a sign of the changing times — changes that haven’t necessarily been for the better for men of Napier’s generation, products of the swinging sixties and seventies.

  Napier’s closest friend is Dr Chas Harley, an academic in the University of Auckland’s English Department. Until a few weeks ago Ha
rley was an associate professor; now he’s a senior lecturer.

  Neither Harley nor the university authorities will comment on the reasons for this apparent demotion but according to informed sources, Harley’s well-earned reputation as a campus Casanova and his blithe disregard for protocols governing staff–student relationships came back to haunt him.

  It’s understood that last year Harley admitted to a student with whom he was having an affair that his romantic liaisons have often spilled over into his work and impacted on his professional conduct. He allegedly gave examples of instances when he’d aided and promoted his girlfriends at the expense of other students.

  The student concerned, who’s a party to Harley’s confidentiality agreement with the university, sought advice from a campus women’s group. They urged her to pass on the information to the university authorities, which she did. The loquacious Harley had also revealed his friend’s adventures in the pornography trade. That information, along with details of his own murky behaviour, was leaked to this newspaper.

  Napier dismisses the suggestion that he and Harley are paying the price for having failed to move with the times.

  ‘I can’t speak for Chas but I find it hard to understand why, at a time when young women happily wear T-shirts emblazoned with the legend “porn star” and porn star memoirs are practically a publishing staple, my little dabble should be regarded as beyond the pale. If there’s a lesson in this it’s that if you’re going to do it, be upfront about it. In this age of shamelessness, to be even a little bit ambivalent is just asking for trouble.’

  The whole affair raises the questions of whether pornography really is coming in from the cold, as some both inside and outside the industry believe (see accompanying story), and where exactly is the line separating pornography from the graphic treatment of sex in mainstream entertainment or high-brow art?

  Sterling’s Submission is a case in point. Although she damns pornographic fiction as ‘misogynistic masturbation fantasies’, a casual reader might find it difficult to spot the difference between her self-styled work of art and the dog-eared eared paperbacks that fill whole shelves in second-hand bookshops and whose titles (Arlene’s Anal Ordeal) leave the browser in no doubt as to what to expect.

  In both cases the female characters have an inexhaustible appetite for sex of any kind except one-on-one in private with the man they love. While Submission features a self-consciously literary prose style and a main character who occasionally interrupts her hectic sexual schedule to philosophise about … well, basically about sex, both it and the unashamedly pornographic novels sampled by this reporter left the feeling of having had far too much of a good thing.

  One critic who was in no doubt that Submission erred on the side of pornography was Max Napier. He was commissioned to review it for this newspaper but opted out, citing his romantic involvement with the author.

  While Sterling still believes Napier was ‘blown away’ by her book, his unpublished review, written a matter of days before their relationship began, shows nothing could be further from the truth. The answer to the question, ‘So how was it for you, Max?’ was, apparently, ‘God-awful.’

  He derides Submission as ‘the diary of a nymphomaniac who nevertheless manages to be a crashing bore, as written by someone whose schoolteachers failed in their most basic task — they didn’t strangle little Tania’s literary pretensions at birth. The reader suffers the consequences of that dereliction of duty, having to wade through the interminable, stinking mangroves of one putrid sex scene after another.’ And that’s one of the milder comments in what is a diatribe of spectacular viciousness.

  Literary editor Trish Bradley had her own reservations about Submission but wouldn’t have run Napier’s review. ‘Max got right off the leash,’ she says. ‘Leaving aside the harshness of the critical assessment, the commentary is way over the top and unnecessarily personal.’

  So what made Napier froth at the mouth?

  ‘I might’ve been guilty of overreacting to some of the absurd claims that were made on the book’s behalf,’ he says, ‘but seeing the issue’s arisen, there are a couple of points worth making. Firstly, the woman’s raunchy confessional novel isn’t new. Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying with its celebration of the zipless fuck came out in 1975, and in the last year or so we’ve had The Bride Stripped Bare, The Sexual Life of Catherine M and 100 Strokes of the Brush before Bed, to name but a few. Secondly, extreme subject matter doesn’t necessarily make a novel daring or ground-breaking or even very interesting. It may just be a wallow in the gutter.

  ‘There’ve always been dirty books for men but that hasn’t been the case for women, so I can understand why there’s a demand for this stuff — women have some catching up to do. I would just urge perspective. Titillation in flowery prose with interludes of mock-profound navel-gazing is still, when all’s said and done, titillation.’

  Love it or loathe it, there’s no denying that by New Zealand standards Submission is already a commercial phenomenon. According to Sheridan, the book has been picked up by publishers in every major English-speaking market as well as France, Italy and Germany. The really big news, though, is that it looks like becoming a Hollywood blockbuster.

  ‘It’s been optioned by a major Hollywood producer,’ says Sheridan. ‘I’m not at liberty to reveal his name but he’s not one of those phonies who talk a good film but nothing ever gets made; this guy’s got a track record as long as your arm. He’s already teed up a top LA scriptwriter and Submission’s being read by a number of A-list actresses as we speak.

  ‘If this comes off — and I’m absolutely confident it will — it’ll catapult Tania into the super league. She’ll be the first New Zealander to become an international brand-name author.’

  For her ex-lover, however, the outlook is less promising.

  According to poet, academic and critic Dr Noelene King, Napier faces a bigger challenge than living down the revelation of his porno past.

  ‘I guess in some quarters he’ll always be tarred with that brush,’ she says, ‘but the reality is that these days Napier doesn’t really loom large enough on the New Zealand literary landscape for it to cause that much of a stir. By living overseas for as long as he did, he missed the boat when local fiction really came into its own.

  ‘He needs to find a way of plugging into the New Zealand experience and contemporary consciousness, otherwise he’s in danger of fading off the radar and ending up as one of those writers who promise more than they deliver.’

  Employing both strings to his bow, he could write a male version of Submission but it probably wouldn’t enjoy the same success.

  Publishers and pornographers agree that men prefer the no-frills approach. Given the choice between erotica with a literary flourish and mass-market hard core, they’ll take the porn every time.

  The photograph of Tania is as contrived as a perfume advert in a glossy magazine. She’s sitting outside a café wearing a black beret, tortoiseshell sunglasses, blinding lipstick, knee-high boots and a leopardskin print skirt, displaying a sophisticated amount of cleavage and lean, pale thigh. On the table in front of her are a notebook and fountain pen, a folded copy of the Times Literary Supplement and a book — A Spy in the House of Love by Anaïs Nin.

  It’s captioned, ‘Tania Sterling: tomorrow the world?’

  The photograph of me was taken before I’d put on my amused, unflappable, worldly face. I look peevish, seedy, caught in the act. Whatever that was, it was obviously very, very wrong.

  It’s captioned, ‘Max Napier: so yesterday?’

  My daughter Emily has started appearing in my dreams — as the teenager I’ve never seen rather than the infant I remember.

  Dreams are phantom experience. Those flurries of electrical activity in the brain during the latter stages of REM sleep can make us believe anything at all. Then we wake up to discover that the experience that was real enough to scare us silly or fill us with joy or make us ejaculate was all in the unconscious
mind. Dreams leave nothing behind: no bliss, no scars, no accomplishments, no memories worth clinging to.

  These dreams of Emily skirt around the issue of her appearance. Sometimes her face is indistinct, sometimes she’s an identikit pretty teenager. Once she looked just like Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive. There have been blonde and brunette versions. It doesn’t matter — who else could it be? Who else in this world would call me Dad?

  They’re all variations on one of two themes. There’s what could be called the wishful-thinking dream in which radiant, talented daughter and proud, sheepish father are reunited. I turn up unannounced at her school prizegiving or theatrical production or the all-England horse trials. Patricia is there, revelling in Emily’s distinction, so I hide in the crowd. If she spots me, she’ll bundle Emily into a car and whisk her away, like a bodyguard panicking over a backfire.

  Eventually Patricia goes off to have strawberries and cream with the headmistress and I seize the moment. Emily takes some convincing, firstly that I’m who I say I am and, once that’s established, that she should have anything to do with me. I promise not to bug or embarrass her; she only has to say the word and I’ll get back in my bottle, like an unwanted genie.

  There’s no soppy stuff — no tear-streaked, happy-ending money shots. My dreams don’t work like that. One minute we’re in a will-she-or-won’t-she face-off, the next we’re in a gondola in Venice and I’m pointing out the bridge where the dwarf slashed Donald Sutherland’s throat at the end of Don’t Look Now. Res ipsa loquitur: the thing speaks for itself.

  I awoke bewildered and a little shaken from the first of these dreams. It’s not that I haven’t given Emily a thought these past fifteen years, but without the substance and context provided by up-to-date physical and biographical information they’ve never got beyond fuzzy sentimentality. I’ve wondered what sort of person she is, what she looks like, what her interests are; I’ve hoped she’s happy. That far and no further. Even if Patricia has tired of painting me black, there’s no reason to suppose Emily would welcome the opportunity to make up her own mind. Plus, there’s probably someone who, to all intents and purposes, is her father. Assuming she’s aware of my existence, I might pop into her head inconsequentially and with eccentric irregularity, like the idea of becoming a private detective or a vegetarian. When she reached ten I gave up sending her, care of friends of Patricia who’d once been friends of mine, Christmas cards and money. They all came back marked Return to Sender.