The journalist goes no further. Thanks to a ruthless system of design apartheid, two rooms are safe both from my wife’s attentions and from journalistic prying: the small cupboard-like bedroom of the designer’s son Doug (teenagers!) and the top floor where her novelist-husband (of Forever Young fame) has his work-station.
I remembered the note, written in Marigold’s busy, exasperated hand, and, as if on cue, Donovan and his fur-balls wandered into the sitting-room, gazed at me for a moment as if daring me to make a move, then stalked off contemptuously.
Cats, I could write the book.* It was soon after my wife had become involved in the feng shui scam, that Dougie, as he was then, expressed a desire for a pet. Perhaps because design was entering a softer phase, reacting against the hard-eyed ethic of the previous decade, Marigold acquiesced with surprisingly good grace, investing in a Persian kitten which our son named ‘Percy’.
It was expensive and elegant. It added a touch exotic playfulness to the minimalist living-room. It was the sort of furry accessory which any suburban family might envy. When it reached the feline age of discretion, it was introduced, with some difficulty (Persian cats are among the stupidest of God’s creatures) to the concept of the catflap. Eventually it learnt to go out, come in and go out – never to be be seen again.
Stolen? Probably. In this area, anything of pecuniary value, even if it has claws and teeth, is vulnerable. Lost? Equally possible, generations of cosseting and in-breeding had not ensured that Percy was irrevocably domesticated, beige in tooth and claw.
So there was grief, then reparation. Another Persian, lighter, fluffier and, on the semi-humorous grounds that it was likely to be more intelligent, female. At eight months, it was found by the side of the road, dying beautifully like a tragic heroine. After a suitable period of mourning, we tried again, this time with a more proletarian and therefore streetwise ginger cat. Wrong: that too disappeared.
By now, Dougie, who was anyway reaching that age in a boy’s life when confidence seems to drain out of the soles of his feet, was beginning to take responsibility for these deaths, as if they were yet more proof of his general unworthiness. The guilt spread to his parents. Rather than give in, thus confirming their son in his lack of self-esteem, we tried again. And again.
Six? Seven? I lost count of the casualty list. As one cat after another fled, or threw itself under the wheels of the first car that passed down the street, it became clear, to me at least, that in a sense Dougie was right. These were no accidents. One after another, the cats had been driven insane by the tidiness and mystical harmony of the house in which they had found themselves. They were topping themselves, responding to feng shui with hara-kiri.
Enter, in the nick of time, Donovan, a thin, scrappy thing of indeterminate hue which appeared through the cat-door one cold winter’s night, demanding food and warmth. Grateful that at least one animal, however moth-eaten and socially inferior, had chosen us, we fed it, took it to the vet for a series of ruinously expensive injections, ignored its flea-ridden appearance. When Marigold claimed unconvincingly (the cat had no discernible sense of humour) that she had seen him gambolling across the lawn trying to catch the wind, like the Sixties hippy, he was named ‘Donovan’. Presumably to avoid the dangers of positive ch’i, he took up residence first in my office, then, having been roughly ejected after confusing the box containing the first three chapters of my London novel Mind the Gap for a cat-litter, in the rankest outpost of this dream home, Doug’s bedroom.
Although it would be an exaggeration to say that any form of significant teenager–cat bonding had taken place, a system of mutual tolerance was established. In the face of strict biological accuracy, he renamed Donovan ‘Shagger.’
Speak Doug.
Draining my glass, I made my way upstairs, hesitated on the landing, drawn to the refuge of my office on the next floor, then turned reluctantly towards the door marked by a poster bearing a smiley-faced drug symbol, behind which skulked my son. The noise was louder now, the door seeming to push outwards with every beat. I knocked, an authoritative we-need-to-talk, four-strike rap.
After a few seconds, there was the sound of a bolt being drawn. The door was opened slightly. Even by his standards, my son’s appearance was dispiriting. His cropped, curly hair seemed to be matted with some dark, dried gel. Since I had last seen him, his pale, watchful face had been invaded by pustules, which stood out among the wispy beginnings of a beard, like snowy mountain peaks in a forest. Between the torn mauve T-shirt, bearing some illegible and possibly obscene legend, and the sagging, baggy shorts a straggly, girlish waist could be seen. The bare feet at the end of his hairy, matchstick legs were encrusted with ancient dirt. Stale air wafted out from the room, seemingly propelled by the thump and noise of his music.
‘Yeah?’
‘Can you turn it down, Doug?’
‘Eh?’
‘Down. Turn it down.’
The face disappeared, the volume was marginally reduced.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Owi? How d’you mean owi?’
‘I mean, work and things…’
‘S’pose.’
‘I’ve been down to the Institute. First lesson of term. Met the usual bunch of losers.’ I paused but it was clear that my son was uninterested in exchanging small talk. ‘I’ll be in my office,’ I said.
‘Owi then.’ He closed the door.
I climbed the stairs to the top floor. Normally, while reading, researching or working on non-fiction, I like to leave the door ajar, only enclosing myself in this book-lined capsule of literary endeavour when actually writing fiction, but this evening the world was too much with me, and I shut it firmly behind me.
It was Balzac who insisted that, now and then, the writer should subject himself to a bain de foule, but right now the bath I needed could only be provided by literature. I took off my corduroy jacket, laid it on the floor, and reached for a small pile of manuscript on the shelf beside the desk. Sometimes, after teaching at the Institute, I would raise my spirits by reading from a favourite work by Hardy, Ford, Greene or Heller, but tonight I felt in need of a more specific and personal validation.
‘Insignificance by Gregory Keays.’
I spoke the title page of my novel out loud in the slightly hammy tone which writers tend to adopt when reading from their own work. Already, I felt reassured, more myself.
I glanced to my right where, on the wall beside Snowdon’s famous portrait of Granta’s 1983 Best of Young British Novelists, I had hung a mirror. When my wife first remarked upon this uncharacteristic act of home-making, I pointed out that, for a novelist engaged in reflection, it was logical and helpful to be able to turn now and then to his own reflected image. Her response was ungenerous.
Writer, teacher, family man: I dare to think that a photograph taken of me at this moment would have indicated a man on whom the conflicting demands of art and life had not taken too harsh a toll. While there was a certain fleshiness around the trunk, neck and face which was not evident in the startled, long-haired character to be seen in the second row of the Granta line-up, an easy humour now attended those watchful eyes – a hint of danger and energy which, to a civilian, might have seemed surprising and possibly inappropriate in a man in his late forties.
I breathed in, squared my shoulders and pursed my lips over the slightly protruding front teeth which, in honesty, I must confess are not my best feature.
All things considered, it was not a terrible sight. I returned to Insignificance.
* * *
The Writer Speaks of … Marriage
The music at a wedding procession always reminds me of the music which leads soldiers into battle.
Heinrich Heine
O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth’s.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for hi
s living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.
Bernard Shaw
Marriage is about roughage, bills, garbage disposal, and noise. There is something vulgar, almost absurd, in the notion of a Mrs Plato or a Mme Descartes, or of Wittgenstein on a honeymoon. Perhaps Louis Althusser was enacting a necessary axiom or lyrical proof, when on the morning of November 16, 1980, he throttled his wife.
George Steiner
It was a very wounding experience, but I got rid of it by writing about it.
V.S. Pritchett, of his first marriage
I believe that all those painters and writers who leave their wives have an idea at the back of their minds that their painting or writing will be the better for it, whereas they only go from bad to worse.
Patrick White
* * *
4
The class’s second lesson was always a key moment. My students would begin to relax and reveal their true characters – the talkers, the sulkers, those who would trash anyone else’s work, those without a negative critical bone in their bodies who would find good in the thinnest, most ill-written prose, the gradehounds looking to add that all-important suggestion of a successful inner life to their c.v., the twitchies looking to creative writing for some kind of value-added therapy, the few, the noble few, who want to be professional writers and change the face of contemporary literature.
They were opening out next door, too. Before we had even started the class, giggles and groans and murmured meditations, the sort of sounds one might hear through a motel wall on a Saturday night reached us from Anna Matthew’s Mind and Body group. Year after year, I would joke to my students that this animalistic soundtrack, rising and falling like a ninety-minute sex act, served as a useful, if cruel, metaphor of the lot of the writer, for whom the real, pulsating world is always at one remove, beyond the thin wall of his creative self-consciousness. Quite often one of them would weaken, disappearing one week to join Anna’s fluting, orgiastic chorus the following week.
As it happened, I preferred to winnow out the more fragile spirits before they could spread a miasma of amateurish sentimentality throughout the rest of the group. During the first lesson, I had, for the benefit of the more half-hearted, portrayed the literary life in all its foetid glory. For the let-it-bleed confessional brigade, I had sternly quoted the Flaubertian dictum that the less you feel a thing, the fitter you are to express it. For those dreaming of riches and the bestseller lists, I had evoked Gissing, starving in his garret. For the middle-aged mums turning to literature after half a lifetime of domestic duty, I dwelt, with gleefully frank vocabulary upon the intimate lives of writers – Rousseau exposing himself, Dreiser jerking off in public, Hemingway inspecting Fitzgerald’s dick, the impotence of Kafka, the castration complex of James.
Sure enough, we had lost two of those who had been here the previous week. Now it was time for the rest of us to get to know one another.
‘Here’s what we are going to do this evening.’ I flashed an encouraging smile around the table. ‘Later on in the course, we shall devote each lesson to the work of two students. Their story or novel extract will have been copied and made available to the rest of the class the previous week for consideration by all of you. This week we shall be getting something of a sampler. We have, I hope, each brought a small contribution as an introduction to your own fictional world.’ One or two of the politer students laughed ingratiatingly. ‘But first, I’d like to hear what you’ve all been reading.’
This, by intention, was a surprise – I know from experience that advance warning sends most of my students to their A level reading lists or to the classics shelves of local bookshops. A certain restlessness was evident around the table, as if this divergence from schedule, from creative writing into literature, was in breach of Institute regulations. ‘Don’t try to impress,’ I said. ‘This is not a job interview. One of my own favourite authors, as it happens, is Elmore Leonard.’
‘Oh yes, he’s great.’ One of two Roberts on the course, an enthusiastic, dapper type whom I had already identified as a would-be-thriller-writer. ‘He’s so, I dunno, authentic.’
I nodded eagerly, as if the idea of Leonard’s authenticity had never previously occurred to me. ‘Very authentic, yes. I’ve always liked his attitude to his work. He once said, “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” He never stops to think about what he is writing, whether a particular word is holy, because, as soon as he becomes self-conscious, he is essentially interrupting his character. A lot of our so-called “literary” writers could learn from that.’
(None of this, incidentally, is what I believe. I have read no more of Leonard than the occasional magazine interview and, although he has much to recommend him – he is old, American, and writes in a sub-genre which has never tempted me – I am allergic to his type of bang-bang fairy-tale with its cast of low-life grotesques, comic violence and obligatory irony. I abhor ‘great reading entertainment’, would rather watch a game show on TV than submit to a ‘compulsive page-turner’; the idea that one day I might in a moment of carelessness actually write an ‘unputdownable’ novel myself sometimes keeps me awake at night.)
‘Didn’t he write Get Shorty?’ Alan, one of two mature students on the course spoke up in a gruff Northern accent.
‘Oh, that was a terrific flick.’ The cut-glass accents of Serafina, clearly the year’s uncritical enthusiast, cut in. ‘I adore Danny de Vito.’
I allowed the conversation to drift pointlessly in the direction of Hollywood caper movies. It relaxed them, suggested (wrongly) that I was as happy to discuss middle-brow entertainments as to explore authentic literary work and, above all, took up time. When, eventually, we found ourselves discussing the work of Quentin Tarantino, I stirred myself and suggested mildly that the cinéastes could pursue the matter later in the pub. Were there any other literary enthusiasms to be declared?
‘Is anyone here into Raymond Carver?’ Jay, our one foreign student, good-looking in that sincere, coddled way of Americans, dropped the inevitable name to blank looks around the table. From him, I could expect a year of stories about car lots and trailer parks, trashy, tragic wives and defeated, self-pitying husbands with a fondness for whisky and violence. At least the stories would be short.
Slowly, the conversation moved forward. Lodge, Atwood, Byatt, Carey, McEwan, Boyd. There was a pattern here: intelligent but not too demanding, the solid well-made story, a whiff of future Eng. Lit. exam syllabuses. As the class embarked upon a halting, uneasy ramble through the foothills of modern letters, mentioning the work of novelists I once regarded as rivals, I assessed the seven students with whom I was doomed to spend an evening a week for the next three terms. Two, I imagined, were on the course because it seemed a relatively painless way of getting grades: Jay, the American, and the second Robert, an unkempt, sleepy individual cut from the traditional student mould, bleary either from narcotic excess or (more likely) from some form of ghastly post-teen angst.
Serafina, I would guess, was a charming, willing girl who would make endless, ill-spelt notes. Privately educated, she had read nothing and would produce childish, optimistic sub-literate work that would test my generosity to the full, but she was so modest and sweet that she was impossible to dislike. Since last week, she had found a copy of Forever Young in her local library and was now obediently reading it. Once, when life was less complicated, I might at this point have been considering her as a potential student-mistress for that year – there was something perverse and seductive in her milky, dimpled complexion, her innocent, slightly overweight body – but the way she smiled back at me was so guileless that I felt a pang of guilt at even imagining her in a sexual context. She was corruptible, of course, but the rewards at the end of it all were unlikely to justify the tears, not to mention the dreary post-coital conversations. I was beyond all that. It made me feel like a pervert.
Alan from Macclesfield, bruised by a failed marriage and redundancy, was, I judged, entering education
with a sort of despairing rage. Bev, the other mature student had, as we had already learnt at some length, produced and raised two children, and left her marriage; now she seemed to be fizzing with ill-directed post-menopausal zest.
None of them would be completely hopeless. Unread, too easily influenced by passing literary fashion as pronounced by the Sunday papers, each, with the possible exception of Serafina, would doubtless show enough talent when they read their stories to the group to allow a useful discussion to develop. Almost anyone can tell a story; it’s finishing it, rewriting it, starting again and again, that tends to be the problem.
Then there was Peter Gibson. An absurdly tall and spindly figure with lank, long hair, he seemed at first to belong to the same school of surly student type as the second Robert. As the others chatted about their favourite writers, he listened in silence. When, out of no more than polite curiosity, I asked who his favourite writers were, he gave a slightly exasperated sigh.
‘I’m not into the list-making thing,’ he said. ‘I read what I read.’
‘We all read what we read.’ A touch of impatience was in my voice. ‘This course is about communicating what we know to fellow writers.’
‘I communicate through my writing. That is what matters.’
Conveniently, a rare moment of silence had descended upon Mind and Body next door, so I allowed the leering arrogance of the boy, his pig-headed inability to enter into the spirit of the occasion, to hang in the air for a moment. Rather to my surprise, he blushed to the roots of his shaggy hair and, as if he were a schoolboy who had been rebuked by his teacher, pulled in his chair, made a thoughtful tent with his long fingers in front of his face, and began to speak, his eyes holding mine.
‘I’ve been trying to come to terms with some of the more recently published French post-structuralists?’ When he spoke, he terminated his sentences with an interrogatory rise of the voice, almost as if he were asking permission for his peculiar enthusiasm. ‘Like everyone, I had read up on literary theory, but the new crowd of writers – les néo-nullistes, as they’re called – have been looking beyond the primacy of the text to redefine the power relationship between reader and writer, taking the fictional project beyond narrative and character. In my own work, I’m looking to bring to bear the spare cerebral reductiveness of modern French writing but cross it with genuine emotional engagement?’
Kill Your Darlings Page 2
