Kill Your Darlings

by Terence Blacker

  For many years now, I have indulged this small fantasy that, at one of these events, Martin will look up, see me, narrowing those eyes in the way that he does, and call me over. ‘Forever Young, wasn’t it?’ he would say. ‘Shit, I always meant to tell you what a difference that book made to my life. Put it there, kid.’ And we would shake hands in a moment of pure bonding, writer to writer. To this effect, I have favoured events where he is speaking, taken to hanging out where he hangs out, emerging from doors as he is passing them, appearing around corners, generally popping up and making myself available for discussion. Now I found myself glancing across the room occasionally, hoping to catch Tony’s eye and be drawn into the group but, unlike the last occasion when we met, he was too busy gazing at his hero, or engaging in eager banter, to notice me.

  As you might have gathered, we have something of a history, Martin and me. Even before we became directly involved with one another, appearing on the same list and in the same photographs, we had been part of each other’s lives, since his first novel had appeared at precisely the moment when I was first considering a career as a writer. Jejune and puppyishly anxious to please as it was, Martin’s teenage masturbation novel gave the illusion of blowing off the library dust from fiction, of clearing its stale, mannered, middle-aged fug. He proved that you could be young yet serious, write about frustration and seediness without being tawdry. Of course, a few of us, not blessed with Martin’s family connections, were working in similar directions in our bedsits and student digs, but it was he who lit the way.

  Our paths diverged. I, like Waugh and Greene, Boyd and Le Carré, taught briefly in a private school, while never taking my eye off my ultimate literary ambition. Martin used the springboard of privilege to work in the kind of books-page jobs (high-profile, low-effort, part-time) reserved for the sons and daughters of the book establishment while assiduously acquiring a reputation as ‘the voice of a generation’. If already there was something of the sleight of hand to his writing, an emotional evasiveness, a willingness to sacrifice an awkward, angular truth to the slick, attention-grabbing phrase, what could one expect? A boy to whom everything had been given without struggle – position, reputation, money, sex – could hardly be expected to understand about the despair and striving and loss the rest of us already knew so well. A chance comment in an interview at the time, in which he conceded that he would sacrifice any psychological or realistic truth for a phrase, or a paragraph that had a ‘spin’ on it, sounded less like a boast than a confession.

  In 1982, my novel Forever Young was published. A couple of the lazier critics deployed the term ‘Amisian’ to describe the jazzy, demotic verve of its prose, the gamy whiff of corruption and curdled desire that attended its crafty, satirical intent. One reviewer, admittedly only in the Sunday Express, noted sneeringly that my work ‘belonged in a junior class of the school of Amis-fils’. I was no more than mildly offended. We all – Martin, Julian, Graham, William, Ian, myself – were drawing water at the same narrow well of contemporary experience; under slightly different circumstances some of Martin’s better work might easily have been described as ‘Keaysian’ or even (a term I tried to coin in a piece written under another name) ‘Gregorian’. As for the jibe from the Express hack (last spotted, doing romance round-ups for a supermarket magazine!), I recognized that, in my first novel, I may have been slightly rawer than Martin but I was also, essentially, truer. I was a writer; he was a flashy bystander, recording changes in the passing scene.

  My problem with Martin became more serious and personal when, with eighteen other young luminaries, we were ranked together on the now-legendary Best of Young British Novelists, selected by Granta magazine in 1983. We only met once during the publicity campaign, at the group photocall, after which a brutal bifurcation occurred, Martin and a couple of others heading off for the national TV shows, the rest of us being distributed among assorted man-and-a-dog local radio stations. All the same, it seemed to me that, in that instant when we had shaken hands in the photographic studio, a very real moment of recognition and bonding had taken place – that we had both understood that, whatever the differences between us in trivial matters of reputation and fame, we were, in a real, creative sense, in this together, part of the same team, working on the same great writerly project.

  Yet the next time we met, in 1984 at a publishing launch party, he affected not to recognize me. Three months later, I attended one of his readings only for it to happen again. Since then, we have been introduced no fewer than eight times; each time, he afforded me the same distant, crooked smile, as if I were a reader, a fan, some fucking punter who had plucked up courage to ask him to sign a copy of one of his novels. It was childish behaviour, graceless, an affront to the muse we shared.

  The growing respect accorded to his work, his carefully nurtured reputation, began to impinge upon my own writing. It seemed that every time I turned a corner, the trim figure of our man was already there, kicking up dust, a dot on the horizon. I would be wrestling with the complex polyphony of Accidents of Trust when his dual narrator novel appeared. I would be stoking the satirical fire of Adultery in Hampstead, only for it to be doused by the appearance of his eighties novel. I would be caught up in my urban alienation novel Mind the Gap when, almost to the second, his own crude working of the same theme, goosed up with modish apocalyptic concerns, arrived to squat plumply and snugly on the front tables of bookshops.

  Nuclear awareness, the end of the world, the new physics, historic guilt, the family: it began to seem as if he were in possession of some kind of bug which tapped into my creative consciousness, so that, just as I considered a new theme for my fiction, a work from Martin, covering the same ground would appear, gleaming and complete, in the bookshops.

  The pre-emptive theft of my inner musings was most evident in the interviews he would occasionally give. At the very point when a thought, a cultural theory, a neat aphoristic insight was making its way from the unconscious into the articulating part of my brain, it would appear, perfectly and conclusively expressed, in his latest press or TV profile. I became a connoisseur of Martinisms, collecting those smart, sardonic, carefully rehearsed throwaway lines in which he encapsulated the very things that I had been just about to say. I would serve them up to my pupils at the Institute, even taking a sort of proprietorial pride in the eagerness with which the would-be writers noted them down.

  ‘I don’t think writers need more than two or three subjects.’

  ‘Every writer thinks he’s in the foreground of breakdown and collapse.’

  ‘There are no rules for the novel.’

  ‘I think you don’t want to know too much about what’s going on out there. You walk through it but you don’t go looking for it and then it will have your imprint on it.’

  ‘To be any good you have to think you’re the best of your generation.’

  ‘At no point in history has the writer spent so much time telling everyone what he’s saying.’

  ‘Just as you find out something about someone when they laugh – when they really laugh – you find out a lot by seeing them in a sexual situation.’

  ‘The definition of a writer is he or she who is happiest alone.’

  ‘Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.’

  Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God. And Martin. Over the years he became more than merely a shrewd writer with an eye to cultural fashion and an ear for the catchy, bouncy phrase. He was a living emblem of what we could, what we should be. He was Everywriter. Physically, he seemed to grow. With every unsmiling photograph, his drawling, easy authority was more in evidence.

  Even the lineaments of his personal life contributed to the myth. It was not enough that, while the rest of us were making our first tentative steps into sexual experience, he was reported to be engaged on a priapic romp through the most famous and brilliant beauties of our own and of the previous generation; his high erotic strike rate, far from draining creative endeavour,
was said by those in the know to have contributed to the confident, randy swagger of his prose. It was not enough for him to belong to smart snooker and tennis clubs while the rest of us made do with pubs and wine bars; his partners and competitors had to be high-profile types, Hitch and Fent, Julian and Clive, guys who, even as they served and potted, added to his credibility. It was not enough for him merely to succumb to the travails and satisfactions of domestic life; he had to be a famously, fashionably doting Daddy. It was not enough for marital happiness to seep away in the normal, time-honoured fashion; he had to have a glamorous writer-lover, a showy divorce, a camp and perfect soap opera from which everyone somehow emerged happier, more fulfilled, better looking. It was not enough to have sired an illegitimate child in his late teens; no, father and daughter had to discover one another twenty years later. Of course, she was not a sad runt of loser living a life of anonymity but good-looking, balanced, and doing rather well at Oxford. How could we doubt it? She was a daughter of Everywriter.

  Those who do not understand the ways of the novelist may be surprised that I came to see a direct and unavoidable connection between Martin’s precious worldly success, his effortless accumulation of money, and my own inability to complete my second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth (if you include Glitter, written under the nom de plume Ivana Schuyler), seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth novels, and for the fact that the stories in my collection Tell Me the Truth About Love, About Love remained more minimal and fragmentary than would have been acceptable even to the master, Raymond Carver. This account is not about failure (‘An author with a grievance is of all God’s creatures the most tedious,’ Max Beerbohm once said) but, in the interests of truth, it must be noted that, by annexing and colonizing my creative life, one man has come to represent the futility of everything I have attempted to write. Mother, teacher, Shakespeare, God: they were all by my elbow as I forged forward. But, when I hit the inevitable quagmire on page 70 or 80, in Chapter Five or Six, it was Martin’s voice that I heard whispering sardonically in my ear that just possibly my time might be better spent on The Write Stuff: A Resource Book for Creative Writing Teachers, in collecting authorly affirmations or in angrily fulfilling a much-delayed contract for Ride the Magic Dragon: A Kids’ Guide to Story-Writing. Although it has turned out that all but a few of my uncompleted works were not dead but sleeping, there have been dark moments over the past decade or so, crises lasting months or years, during which Martin’s achievements have seemed entirely responsible for my lack of them.

  It was, perhaps, a perverse comfort that, as his career developed from young promise to middle-aged establishment figure, one failure, at the very epicentre of his writing life, became increasingly evident. At a moment when his life seemed to be falling apart, with the loss of wife, children, teeth, agent, friends (Martin’s mid-life crisis was, it goes without saying, more dramatic and garish and yet more lucrative than anyone else’s), he admitted, in that weary mid-Atlantic drawl, so indistinct that many of the brilliant things he says seem to come at you twice – once when you catch its general drift, then again when you realize how perfectly, wittily and adeptly it has been expressed – he confessed to an interviewer that he guessed he was never going to be regarded as a chronicler of the human heart.

  Of course. A chronicler of the human heart was precisely what he had increasingly longed to be. No one, not even Martin, could build a literary reputation entirely on being cool. Families happen. Children happen. Life happens. The witty, elegant skimmer over the surface needs eventually to acquire some depth. He cranked up his subject matter, from the personal and sexual to the universal and apocalyptic but it wasn’t (he knew, we knew) enough. Thoughtful and interesting as his meditations on such major league tear jerkers as the Holocaust or the death of the planet may have been, he, the author, little Martin, had remained at the end of it all the same disapproving, sneering figure observing wittily, brilliantly and coldly, from the outside. In his next work, the long awaited literary envy novel (what kind of subject was that for a grown-up writer?), he tried again, this time playing the fatherhood card, the flinty-male-heart-melting-with-parental-love card, the little-kiddies-in-danger card.

  Nope. Yet again it didn’t work. You laid the novel down, awe-struck, impressed, dry-eyed.

  Now, in Gloucester, it was time for Martin’s gig. With his courtiers in attendance, he made his way out of the bar. I put away the novel I had been pretending to read and, before taking my seat in the hall, I visited the gents’ lavatory, where something faintly discomfiting occurred.

  I was standing at a urinal when the door opened behind me and, as if I were dreaming, the small, distinguished figure of Martin was suddenly there, beside me, fishing in his underpants not more than two feet away from me. We stood, sharing that moment of forced intimacy when two men are shoulder to shoulder with their penises hanging out in a public place. It occurred to me that I might break the silence in an easy male manner (but instead of the usual banalities, I would have had to say something more literary and informed, like, ‘What on earth possessed you, in the London novel, to equate black holes in space with an act of inverse sexuality performed with Nicola Six?’ He would have explained that he was attempting to put a spin on a banal, everyday act, to give it universal resonance, and in reply I probably would have joked, ‘Every day? You filthy bastard, Martin’ and we would both have laughed in a blokeish though literary way, buttoned ourselves up, washed our hands and left) but, when I glanced at him, he was staring ahead, chewing gum, like a boxer before a fight. I remembered that he was about to appear on stage and decided that it was possibly a touch insensitive to probe him about his work at what was, in any event, quite a vulnerable moment, that he might even have thought it slightly creepy that some guy wanted to talk about sodomy and Nicola at a urinal. A great, manly, lagerish stream issued from him. I tried to relax myself. I thought of things to distract me, listed the names of the novels I have failed to finish. Nothing happened. I had dried up. Martin had done it to me again. I stood there, in an agony of self-consciousness, feeling like an intruder, the sort of person who goes to the gents and stands there, dick exposed, for the sheer hell of it, like someone who gets a thrill from visiting a brothel and not going to bed with any of the girls. Without so much as a glance in my direction, he finished, put himself away with that little backward thrust of the buttocks that men do and walked out.

  Now I peed, my shoulders slumped in despair. There had been nothing actively hostile in his behaviour over the past few seconds, and yet it had not been entirely normal, as if the usual business between men – a nod of acknowledgement, maybe a few casual words – was something he, as a successful writer, had outgrown. Compared to other novelists I had seen at festivals, he seemed to have acquired that kind of transparent outer shell that celebrities have to protect them from the world of nosy civilians. It occurred to me that here was a direct connection between his easy, confident assumption of the role of the public writer and his utter inability to inject feeling or warmth into his novel. ‘The best seeing is done by the hunted and the hunter, the vulnerable and the hungry,’ says Updike. ‘The “successful” writer acquires a film over his eyes. His eyes get fat. Self-importance is a thickened, occluding form of self-consciousness.’ Briefly, as I washed my hands, then dried them on paper tissue, I sympathized with Martin for his fat eyes, his palpable lack of writerly vulnerability and hunger.

  I walked into the big adjoining hall and took a seat near the back (it was, of course, packed and the audience was younger, more female, attractive and somehow more open than any other audiences at that festival) and listened as Tony Watson effected a smooth, empty, ingratiating introduction, laden with the many critical clichés that had appeared in countless profiles and reviews over the years but sugared with a simpering intimacy. Legs crossed, emanating a languor that was within a scintilla of being outright boredom, the novelist sat on a chair in a semi-sprawl, staring over the heads of his audience as if he had become so used to bein
g surrounded by people who listened to his every jewelled word, admired his tan, his clothes, his perfect hair, that they no longer existed for him. After several long minutes of waffle (the more Tony struggled to gain a purchase on his talent, the more it slipped through his fingers), during which the audience grew restless in a way that was almost sexual, Martin was invited to take the stand. He stood up, his lack of stature oddly adding to his air of distinction, laid some rough-looking papers on the lectern, and cleared his throat.

  I’ve heard the intro. The sleepy drawl, delivered at a volume which, like his novels, demands his audience to sit up and make an effort. He’ll throw in some faintly contentious but always interesting idea – about humour, or sex, or science, or writing – as if it had just occurred to him as he was speaking. Now as he chatted to us, like a tennis champ warming up before a big game with some effortlessly flashy shots, I looked around the marquee, taking in the guy’s constituency.

  Several of the other middling-to-major literary performers were here, some in the row of VIP seats at the front, others sitting a touch self-consciously among the members of the public. This was unusual: it is an unspoken rule that only for a friend or a higher member of the literary aristocracy (some revered international figure, or perhaps a Nobel Prize winner) does a writer turn out for these talks. Like getting a book signed by a fellow author, a ghastly solecism in writerly circles, sitting respectfully as some rival reads his work, talks about his life, dilates weightily upon his views of the novel, is simply not done. I thought of Cheever’s likening of the crazed rivalry between novelists to that of sopranos. To see one lording it over an adoring public is worse, far worse, than experiencing the ecstatic reviews for his book. It eats into the soul.