‘Ah yes.’ I shifted uneasily in my chair. Ever since I played with the form in my 1991 novel, A/The/Until, a ludic, experimental work which dispensed entirely with verbs, I have found that anything bearing the accursed prefix ‘post’ sets off alarm bells in my cranium (I am post-post). Yet the tone of Peter’s little speech was so rapt and personal, as if he were confessing for the first time some profound and uncomfortable intimacy, that I felt temporarily disarmed. ‘The dreaded néo-nullistes. Which ones in particular?’
‘Labrun, Houellier-Masson, Geneviève Debru. I’m finding Tchaviev a bit of struggle.’
‘Yes, not easy.’ I made a note on my pad, then glanced at my watch. ‘Perhaps at this point we should read our little fictions. Who would like to start?’
After the briefest of pauses, it was Robert – the neater of the two Roberts – who spoke. ‘I’ll go,’ he said, taking some perfectly typed pages from a folder. ‘It’s a sort of murder thing.’
And so it was. Robert’s unnecessarily brutal and hectically plotted set-piece, which told us rather more about his taste for violence than we wanted to know, was the first of the predictable readings. Scruffy Robert maundered on about his dad. Serafina introduced us, not for the last time, I feared, to the sun-dappled, Blytonesque setting of her childhood. Describing a man being fired, Alan revealed that his feeling for language had been fatally impaired by several years’ exposure to the internal memo. Bev shared with us a conversation with a counsellor which may or may not have been an attempt at irony (confusingly, she herself was uncertain about the matter).
‘And Peter.’
I smiled at the gangling youth, his chair pushed away from the table, his head sunk in his chest.
There was a stirring, a complicated untangling of spidery limbs. Peter reached for the folder in front of him and took out two sheets of paper and laid them on the table, with a careful flattening movement of both hands. Single-spaced, with no paragraphs, they looked unpromising and, as he stared down at the paper, Peter frowned almost as if he had brought the wrong story.
Frankly, I didn’t warm to him. I had seen this kind of build-up before. The moody artist, dazed and in thrall to his muse, can play quite well at literary festivals where the audience is hungry for a glimpse of the tortured writer, but performed by an unpublished young pup in a seminar room, it tends to be less impressive. If he had been a poet, Peter might just have got away with it, but novelists, particularly would-be novelists, should be anonymous.
He looked up at me, those wary blue eyes between two dark curtains of hair holding mine, and I wondered briefly whether he had consumed some kind of banned substance. Since he seemed to be asking for permission to start, I encouraged him with a brisk little circular movement of the hand.
Peter’s reading voice, when at last it came, was quiet and classless but with the hint of a northern accent, yet its very flatness conveyed a sort of stunned passion. He spoke so quietly that, even though, as if on cue, the hums and chants of Anna Matthew’s Mind and Spirit class next door had died down (Peter had this odd magical effect on his surroundings), we had to strain to hear him.
The story he told was notable first of all for its simple, pared-down style, so free of embellishment or self-consciousness that, absurd as it may sound, it was almost as if we were getting the experience unmediated by prose, as if he had perfectly enacted Ford Madox Ford’s requirement that the reader should be ‘hypnotized into thinking he was living what he read’. It was a tale told by a three-year-old, a story of death – murder, probably – involving two adults, possibly his parents. Somehow, in 2000 words or so, he conveyed not just the event and its physical and emotional setting but also a sense of the years of blighted life stretching into adulthood that lay ahead of the narrator.*
When he finished, we sat in silence for a few seconds before, as it were, starting to breathe again. Then, impassive as ever, he returned the sheets to their folder and sat back.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Comments, anyone?’
‘Wow,’ sighed Bev.
I looked round the table. ‘Anything a little more critically developed than “Wow”?’ I smiled at Bev, hoping that she wouldn’t take my remark as a reproof. The fact was, her response was the only appropriate one but I tried, in the first lesson, to allow students to find their own reviewing voice. Encouragement, criticism, deconstruction from me could come later.
‘That poor child,’ said Serafina. ‘I mean, I know it’s a story and all that but it felt so real.’
‘So were they his parents?’ asked Scruffy Robert.
‘Could be,’ said Peter.
‘You don’t know?’
‘I do.’ Peter, mumbling into his chest, showed signs of losing interest. ‘But I’m the writer. You’re the reader. Ambiguity is central to my project.’
‘I think she was his mum and he was her boyfriend,’ said Bev.
‘If it works for you,’ said Peter with a private smile which I suspect I was not alone in finding unnecessary and irritating.
And so the discussion limped forward. Peter listened politely, contributing little. When eventually it tapered off, I announced that I would read a brief extract from my first novel Forever Young. I opened the book on chapter three, paused for a moment, then began. ‘Jimi had never been to an orgy before. Be-ins, love-ins, sit-ins, lie-ins but never an actual orgy…’
Yes, I chose the scene in a squat in Eel Pie Island which has perhaps become one of Forever Young’s best-known set-pieces.* Normally it’s an acceptable way to close the first seminar: comic, confidently written and frank enough both in its language and content to encourage my students towards an unbuttoned approach to their own work. On this occasion, though, the laughter seemed forced. After Peter’s story, my prose sounded heavy-footed, my humour as crude and old-fashioned as the routine of an end-of-the-pier comedian, my characters no more than irritating shadows, like minor faults on a photograph, flitting across the incomparably more vivid and significant world which he had created. When I finished, there were polite murmurs of approval but I sensed that it had not quite ‘caught’ in the way it has on similar occasions in the past.
Later, walking home, having discussed with Serafina and Bev their lack of a typewriter or word processor, I passed a wine bar on King Street. There, holding on to a glass as if it were a lifeline, was Peter Gibson. I hesitated. He looked up. Our eyes met. I gave a little wave and hurried on.
* * *
Top Ten Start-Up Rituals of the Great Writers
1. Malcolm Lowry would rise early and go for a swim. His wife was only allowed to stir in the house when she heard the animal-like noises that he would make once he had entered his trance-like state of creation.
2. John Galsworthy installed his wife in the room next door to his study and required her to play the piano quietly.
3. Somerset Maugham would read Candide so that ‘I have in the back of my mind the touchstone of that lucidity, grace and wit.’
4. Jack London wrote for twenty hours a day and rigged up a device attached to his alarm-clock that would drop a weight upon his head to wake him up.
5. Ernest Hemingway sharpened twenty pencils.
6. Virginia Woolf wrote a little sketch every morning to amuse herself. ‘They might be islands of light – islands in the stream I am trying to convey.’
7. John Steinbeck wrote warm-up exercises on the left-hand side of his notebook.
8. Alan Garner likes to watch a black-and-white B-movie, preferably starring Ronald Reagan, with the sound turned down.
9. Isabel Allende starts every new book on 8 January and places the collected works of Pablo Neruda under her computer ‘with the hope they will inspire me by osmosis’.
10. Toni Morrison gets up before dawn, lights a candle and walks around the house. If she waits until sunrise, when it’s too late to light the candle, she knows she will be unable to write that day.
* * *
5
Insignificance was in trouble.
I found myself reluctant to leave my bed in the morning, indulging in an ever-more protracted series of displacement activities, spending hours fiddling with chapter heads, fonts, spelling checks or, most painfully of all, word counts. An awful staleness now seemed to emanate from the pitifully small manuscript which, it appeared to me in my state of writerly paranoia, begged, demanded, to be put out of its misery by premature retirement to that rest-home for uncompleted projects, a filing-cabinet drawer mockingly marked ‘Work in progress’. It became agony to reread the few words I had completed, every word and phrase seeming flat and dull and tetchy from over-use. Sometimes, as a sort of dazed, masochistic boredom tightened its grip towards the middle of the morning, I would kill a few moments comparing a paragraph of my writing to that of some past student who had shown such exemplary lack of talent that I had kept the work to point up some common failure among inexperienced writers. Was one really so much better than the other? Read blind, would it be immediately clear to a reader that one was by a writer once publicly recognized as one of the Best of Young British Novelists, snapped by Snowdon, while the other was by a receptionist with brief and soon-to-be-dashed dreams of writing a successful historical romance?
Worst of all, a sure sign of danger ahead, I took to reading pages from my own earlier work, from Forever Young, Accidents of Trust, Mind the Gap, Adultery in Hampstead, A/The/Until, Tell Me the Truth about Love, about Love, Giving It Large, Cenotaph, even my tawdry attempt at 1980s populism Glitter. It seemed clear to me that, where there had once been personality, there was now derivativeness, where there had been wit, there was cynicism, where the words had jumped off the page with impudent joy and bounce and swagger, they now dragged their feet wearily onwards, emitting a susurration of exhausted dullness and defeat. Suddenly, my prose was an old man’s snore, slack, toothless, wet-lipped, waiting for that moment of painful, yet blessed closure.
Even my writing workouts were becoming heavy-footed. I would stare out of the window and haltingly record the progress of activity in the park – the enraged young mother pushing a pram, her older child lagging five yards behind her, the old woman whose face seemed to be imploding, eaten up by some wasting disease, the dog-fights, the drunks on a bench, the footballers at lunch-time, the teenage dodgies wandering about in shifty manner in their puffa jackets. I lifted them from life, teeming and urgent and secret, and laid them carefully on the page, stone-dead. Words. Worthless, empty words. Who needed them?
At the back of my mind, I heard the mocking echoes of Peter Gibson’s story – direct, easy, full of feeling expressed in unfussy, confident prose. It seemed to me even then that Peter was me – the younger, confident me that me I had lost.
I took the familiar, radical decision. I was too close to the work. I was becoming stale. There was a project, with a real contract and a real deadline, that demanded my attention, The Book of Literary Lists. Maybe, while researching and compiling charts and surveys revealing the habits, working methods and domestic arrangements of the great writers, I would be infected by their industry and dedication and fall back in love with my novel.
So, at the end of another arid and agonized day of non-creation, I placed Insignificance in the ‘Work in Progress’ drawer, vowing with a weary solemnity that this was not adieu but au revoir.
It was a Friday evening. Soon after I had taken my notes for The Book of Literary Lists and laid them in neat piles across my desk for the next day’s work, I made my way downstairs. There, to my surprise, was my wife. She was in the kitchen, cooking, or rather unwrapping an expensive pre-prepared meal that she had bought from a shop in Chiswick specializing in food for the busy professional couple. In my memory, I see her wearing an apron but this must be husbandly fantasy. She was, as far as I remember, in an elegant little purple dress of haut bohemian style. At forty-two, Marigold has the slight, confident figure of a woman whose sensuality would radiate from sackcloth and this simple, priestly and faintly perverse garb caused me a familiar pang of lust. Seeing my wife in the kitchen tended to do that to me, even then and even after everything we had been through.
She glanced up as I stood in the kitchen doorway and, sensing what was going through my mind, pursed her lips. ‘I thought we might eat together,’ she said, fussing with fake competence over a salad. ‘As a family.’
‘Mm. Treat,’ I said.
Ever since Doug had taken to eating his meals upstairs alone, Marigold and I had been dining separately. When she was not with clients, my wife would partake of some fashionable, nutritious cold snack in the kitchen early in the evening, sometimes even standing up at the kitchen table, as if to ensure a hasty conclusion should I choose this moment to appear after my day’s work. With a few muttered words of acknowledgement, she would take her glass of wine to the living-room where she would read some modish book of spiritual guidance and personal fulfilment while I prepared my more traditional cooked meal in the kitchen.
In truth, we had little to talk about now that our one common project of the past seventeen years was hiding from the world. Each of us, I suppose, had come to the conclusion that this rota system afforded us one of the comforts of long-term marriage – the ease of company without the effort of conversation.
I took a bottle of Blanc de Blancs from the fridge, opened it and gave Marigold a glass. She mumbled thanks.
‘Can I help?’ I said, sitting at the kitchen table and opening a copy of Interiors magazine. It was an old joke of our marriage, a distant echo from earlier, happier days, and briefly Marigold’s face softened. ‘That’ll be the day,’ she said.
There had been a time, before she moved among professionally arty types for whom an aesthetic sensibility delivered a financial and social pay-off, when the simplicity and purity of the creative life had appealed to Marigold. By a cruel paradox, it was my success shortly after we had married which alerted her to the fact that artistic integrity and worldly success could live together – a short step from her current position where the first could not in any real sense exist without the second. When Forever Young was causing a small but gratifyingly significant flutter in the literary world, I ran with a crowd of aspiring writers and even dared to entertain my friends at the flat we then shared. Although Marigold tolerated them, I occasionally discerned even then a certain impatience when my less successful, unpublished friends indulged in the traditional literary activity of complaining about publishers and agents. Occasionally, after they left, she would wonder out loud if I should not be raising my sights and ask whether, since I was now among the cream of the country’s writing talents, I should not be inviting some of the Granta Best of Young British crowd to our evenings. Although I doubt that she had ever heard of Cyril Connolly (she has never been a great reader), Marigold would certainly have agreed that ‘failure is infectious … and unless a writer is quite ruthless with these amiable footlers, they will drag him down with them.’
In those days, the telephone seemed to ring all day. Editors. Producers. Journalists. I was young by the standards of the book world. My promise had been confirmed by my presence on the Granta list. I was hot. When Martin or Salman were not available to deliver a quote on the literary issue of the week, literary editors would turn to Gregory Keays. This was the cultural life which my wife understood: visible, profitable, social. The romance of the garret soon faded.
As if in sympathy with my change of fortune, she abandoned dreams of becoming an artist and, after a brief flirtation with the idea of running a gallery, discovered a talent for interior design, for the moneyed minimalism in vogue during the Eighties. Briefly, a matter of eighteen months at the most, we were the enviable metropolitan family unit of her dreams: the novelist, the designer and their quiet, angelic baby son.
Money became a problem: not the lack of it, but the balance of distribution. My second novel, Accidents of Trust, was mired in technical difficulty. As my confidence became eroded, so did my position in le tout Londres littéraire. Marigold worked harder to sustain our desirable fami
ly unit and may even, at that point, have been proud that her entrepreneurial efforts were helping to support a true writer. She was now a freelance designer and, with an unerring instinct for a trend, had sensed a cultural shift from overt consumerism towards the gentler form of self-obsession afforded by spiritual growth. Before virtually anyone else, she moved into the area of feng shui décor.
Now, when the telephone rang, it was for her. I was no longer an acclaimed novelist but merely a husband who wrote. She bought this house. She decorated it in her own fashion after only the most cursory consultation with me. The adorable infant Douglas became the playful child Dougie. As Marigold acquired the sheen of a public person, I, with a sort of self-lacerating miserliness, became ragged and pale and distracted – a living, shuffling breach of my wife’s house style. To appease her, I took up the offer of a monthly column in The Professional Writer, then began to work part-time at the Institute. Yet the miserable trickle of revenue that these forays into the world of salaried employment provided somehow seemed to irritate her more than if I were earning nothing at all. There is, we quickly discovered, little comparison between the earnings of a top feng shui designer and those of even a compromised writer. Marigold did not need to point out (although now and then she did) that a month’s part-time consultancy for a large firm responding to the pitiful New-Age yearnings of their employees was worth two years’ fiction writing. She used to leave bank statements on the kitchen table.
Kill Your Darlings Page 3
