Kill Your Darlings

by Terence Blacker

  I align myself with those for whom the letting in of a second person meant a great releasing of artistic expression: it was precisely at the moment when I first found happiness with Marigold Cameron that I began to write fiction with any degree of passion and confidence. It was as if we had discovered a new form of loving, both grander and more intimate than anything we had experienced or even heard about before. This was not just sex – sex didn’t begin to cover it – but sex was where it started. Sometimes the lurch of physical yearning occurred before my conscious, sentient being had realized I had seen her. I would be aware of the sharp scrotal tingle of need, look up, and there she would be walking towards me down a street, hair, hips swinging wantonly, smiling in the knowledge of what we were both thinking. It was a sensation I had never known before. I never will again, I suppose.

  The miracle (today it seems to me more of a miracle than ever) was that she wanted me as much, possibly even more, as I wanted her. When at last we were alone and I could touch her, indecorously plunge my hand between her legs like the fat boy groping in the sweet jar, I would find her drenched with need. This small, neat, controlled person who, minutes before, had been conversing so earnestly about minimalism or Warhol or the latest Conran shop was now a writhing, gasping, trembling, ravening entity of desire, all mouth and cunt and eager groping fingers.

  We didn’t wait. We couldn’t wait. Against back street walls, on park benches, in bushes, on the deck of a ferry, in a train carriage, on the top floor of a night bus, but, most frequently of all, crammed, crouching, laughing in countless lavatory cubicles across the south of England. No word was necessary on these occasions; just a look, a nod. She would go first. I would follow seconds later, a light finger tapping on the locked door and soon we would be home, garments flying, limbs at impossible angles, straddling basins, grasping pipes, crouching over toilets, in our own gymnastic display of lust.

  Sometimes we would be caught, emerging, aglow and triumphant, or, at some other time, an alert stranger might catch a look between us and, understanding in that instant that we were in thrall to an almost comically all-consuming youthful need, would look away quickly like a voyeur caught in the act, as if the mere expression on our faces was too intimate and naked for public gaze.

  We talked about it, proud of the quality and quantity of our sex, smugly comparing the sharp, dangerous pleasures we enjoyed in the secret world we had invented to those experienced by other couples or on screen. For a while, during those first months, we went out of our way to court danger and discovery, as if this experience were too overwhelming to be kept to ourselves, too intense not to be on unofficial but open display.

  It grew stronger. Fucking was no longer enough. We did it all, the cuffs and restraints and smacks, the power games, the bathroom stuff, the jerk-off races. We chafed at the limits of human erotic geography that excluded enticing inner territories (spleen, lungs, large intestine) from our probing and licking and penetrating. Sex boutiques were our toy shops, Soho strip joints our cabaret. When we weren’t doing it, we talked about it, fascinating one another with the differences between male and female sensation and fantasy and pleasure. At one point, we discussed sharing a lover, and even set up an informal audition over dinner for one of her friends, a slim, dark-haired type who was between boyfriends and thought to be open to experimentation, before deciding with a wordless glance early in the evening that each of us was simply too good to share.

  Meanwhile we were developing what they call a relationship, acquiring a social circle, moving in together, attending young-people dinner-parties, becoming acquainted with one another’s families, getting married. It was as if we were living parallel lives, one adult, responsible and socialized, the other childish, wilful, indulgent and pleasurable.

  We saw our friends change as they became habituated to one another, dulled by a world of mortgages and children and disappointment. Yet, when Marigold became pregnant, the dance became if anything, more feverish. There was something ineffably arousing about this beautiful, swelling creature that still – morning, noon and night – wanted to fuck and suck and play games. Douglas arrived, the fruit not of Mr and Mrs Keays, citizens of this parish, but of their glorious lower, lust-driven natures. It had been a difficult birth and for a while Marigold’s body was too tired and battered for our parallel life to be restored. Then, one night, as our baby slept, my wife knelt on the bed, peeled off her nightdress and, with a crazy, hilarious formality, presented me with the gift of her beautiful, dazzling, blue-veined, shiny-nippled breasts. I was the happiest man alive.

  And so it remained. That intimacy was our constant. Through my brief moment in the sun during the early 1980s, through the financial pressures of young marriage, through the infant years of Douglas Keays. We were no longer part of the exhibition game, of course – the years of alfresco gropes and cubicle sex were over – but our bedroom became a refuge which even our son (we took to locking the door) could not penetrate. If there were times when one of us felt irresponsible, or even adolescent, in our pursuit of pleasure, we did not risk breaking the spell by confiding these thoughts to the other.

  Seven years into our marriage and we were still making love every day – at night or in the morning when we awoke or, most often of all, during Douglas’s sleep time during the afternoon. Lying in bed beside my beautiful naked wife while, beyond the closed curtains, the world went about its important, trivial business, I would feel absurdly blessed.

  Of course, the parallel lives never do remain entirely separate; they influence and infect one another without ever quite meeting. Sometimes the effect can be benign: there were occasions – social, professional or domestic – when a glance or a touch could remind us of another reality, purer, simpler, uncompromised by words, than that with which we were both obliged to deal during our adult, clothed lives. It kept us sane, put things in perspective.

  There came a time, though, when the influence seeped the other way, when even the honest lust we felt for one another was complicated by our lives as grown-ups outside the bedroom door. It was a time when I was at work on Accidents of Trust, yet mired in the agonies of a Chapter Five from which I would never emerge. The calls from publishers, literary editors, fellow authors, radio producers, no longer came in. Now when the telephone rang, it was from some wealthy idiot wanting London’s hot new designer to energize their flat with ch’i and ceramic waterfalls and correctly positioned lavatories. Briefly, Marigold had persuaded herself that what appeared to be a decline in my career was, in fact, a function of integrity, a literary seriousness that precluded accepting the jobs and compromises that lesser, more successful novelists were prepared to accept, but, in those days when achievement was weighed in pounds and dollars, this was an unfashionable position and my wife could be anything but unfashionable. She became the head of the household.

  The love-making, that had always contained rage in its tenderness, safety in its danger, changed, and our shared separateness gave way to something more rivalrous and muscular. The balance of power shifted. I would catch a look in Marigold’s eyes that belonged to her other life, irritated, determined and cold. Sometimes it seemed that we were no longer making love but wrestling for supremacy, looking for weakness, waiting for a moment when, with a pelvic twitch or a cunning shift of body weight, we could achieve a submission.

  Her will was stronger than mine, her grip almost masculine in its power. What had for so long been fluid and sinuous was now angular and stubborn; the melting flesh became sinew and bone, elbows and knees. At first, I put the change down to my wife’s new enthusiasm for the modish business of pumping iron, bicycling and rowing at the local gym but, no, it was more than a mere question of physique. An element of resentment was there, as if my way of making love had become something imposed upon her, an obligation she was no longer prepared to accept. Why should she need to be touched and caressed into readiness when, in a vulgar, male way, I was ready within seconds? And look at it, that absurd, quivering thing of mine:
what once had been a shared instrument of pleasure, a link of flesh between us, she now treated with the rough lack of respect or affection accorded a weapon raised in anger against womankind, a baton representing generations of oafish patriarchal repression.

  Our refuge, our sacred bed, suddenly seemed to become little more the site for a hand-to-hand-skirmish in the gender war. The new, assertive Marigold found something insultingly passive in the very geography and physics of male-female intimacy. Was it fair that I should enter her, as if she were some kind of receptacle? Where did it reside, my right to sexual completion within seconds if I so wished (although I never did) if not in the traditional male-female hegemony? Why, in fact, should she be obliged to lie beneath me like some beast of burden upon which the squire of the bedroom had elected to take a ride? She became active, aggressive, often treating my body as if it were no more sentient than one of the toys with which we used to play. I (it) was there for her pleasure. She rarely looked at me now, but fucked with a grim, abstract determination. The more advanced her desire, the further she slipped from me.

  Was it normal? I wondered. Was this the intimate expression of a great general change in the balance of power between men and women? Perhaps, all over the western world, wives had begun acting in bed like men, using their husbands as little more than sexual aids to be taken up, used, and pushed away. Now and then I attempted to assert myself, to make love in a more active, masterful, manly way, but if I was not rejected (she was either in the mood or not in the mood – there was no middle way), a bizarre sort of tussle would develop which, under any other circumstances, would be funny but which now made me feel like the archetypal male abuser, the marital rapist. Invariably, after a certain amount of push and shove, I would submit. We never talked about this, perhaps because each of us, in our different ways, felt ashamed by the way we behaved.

  In the end, sexual superiority was no longer an option. Why should the person who, in every other area was less potent and active, assume a position of power in the bedroom?

  When I made my move, Marigold would push me back impatiently and take control. When she straddled me, face turned away, one hand pressing down upon my chest or even my neck as if to prevent me from escaping, the other working away at herself like a housemaid trying to remove a stubborn stain, I would lie still, undulating obediently. When she came with an angry gasp and a wince (even her orgasms were resentful now), I followed a few steps behind, apologetically, insignificantly, in sex as in life.

  Within minutes of disengagement, she would turn her back on me and quickly fall asleep.

  * * *

  The Writer Speaks of … Compromise

  Of potboilers let none speak. One hangs them upon necks that could soar above his heights but for the accursed weight.

  George Meredith

  That is the unpardonable sin! To make a trade of art!

  George Gissing

  Literature flourishes best when it’s half a trade and half an art.

  Dean Inge

  The truth is that an artist who demands appreciation from the public on his own terms, and none but his own terms, is either a god or a conceited and impractical fool … The sagacious artist, while respecting himself, will respect the idiosyncrasies of his public.

  Arnold Bennett

  Certainly if no nation can exist half free and half slave no man can write half whore and half straight.

  Ernest Hemingway

  This, then, is the penalty of writing for the masses. As the writer goes out to meet them half-way he is joined by other writers going out to meet them half-way and they merge into the same creature – the talkie journalist, the advertising, lecturing, popular novelist.

  Cyril Connolly

  * * *

  16

  It would be convenient and tidy-minded to gloss over the events of that night in Peter’s room, to treat what happened between us as an act of bonding, a passing moment when the spiritual communication between teacher and pupil, writer and writer, found a brief physical manifestation.

  Convenient, tidy-minded, but untrue.

  I awoke the next morning to find myself in a tangle of sheets, my face buried in the unkempt dark mass of Peter’s hair, my hand resting on his waist. The window had remained closed and the air in the room was thick with the stale, sickly memory of the night’s activity. I pulled him gently towards me; sleepily, he rolled over, lying against me. I lowered the duvet and gazed at his lean body, so pale that it seemed to glow in the light that penetrated the curtains. I had thought that desire would pass but now, breathless and aroused, I knew it would not.

  I am not gay. Apart from the few isolated incidents at public school, which I subsequently regarded as functions of loneliness and the adolescent need for tactile comfort, I have remained steadfastly and unfashionably heterosexual. It is true that, over recent years, I have caught myself daydreaming of those days, specifically of a younger boy for whom a passing tendresse found less innocent expression in my bed on my very last night at school, but then the writer’s imagination is an intrepid traveller; ‘all great novels, all true novels, are bisexual,’ as Milan Kundera has said. In reality, I have many gay friends, whom I have accompanied to their favoured clubs and leather bars, without the thought of upgrading our relationship ever arising. While I have read the cream of male homosexual fiction, from Gide to White, from Baldwin to Hollinghurst – indeed have taken an interest in the arcane practices they describe – I have studied them with a cool, artistic inquisitiveness, untouched by the slightest breath of carnality.

  Yet, of course, one is curious. The options available, the etiquette involved in resolving who does what to whom, the physical equality, the brute simplicity of it all. With a woman, however brief and inglorious the encounter, the ghost of Relationship, of Future, of Hope hovers over the bed. A power struggle is being enacted. Homosexual man has resolved this difficulty, affording primacy to desire and desire only. Or at least so one gathers from the extensive literature available on the subject.

  Much of this natural writerly curiosity was satisfied during my night with Peter Gibson. I discovered that, with the right man, there is no ‘After you, Cecil; no no, after you, Claud’. There was no edgy negotiation around the giving and taking of pleasure. With the right man, it is all giving and all taking, all consumed and all-consuming. Far from being overcome by shyness and lack of experience, we let instinct lead us. We became our bodies, beyond words and thoughts and manners, glorying in the unaccustomed touch of man’s flesh under hands and lips. Lacking women’s scented softness which even during her earth-mother, hairy armpit phase Marigold retained (as if the female has a sort of natural soap gland), physical love with Peter felt feral and natural. Possibly, on any other night, one or both of us might have recoiled from what we were doing to one another but we were each in a state of extreme vulnerability, Peter from his writing, me from my life.

  For a few moments we lay there in silence. Peter’s head was turned away from me but I sensed that he too was awake. There was a tension to his body, as if he feared that, when I remembered what had happened last night, I would leap from the bed in girlish horror and embarrassment. Truth to tell, there was no danger of that. We had made love three times before falling into fitful, satiated sleep and each time we had found each other seemed better and more natural than the last. I ran my hand down the long, shallow channel of his backbone, coming to rest between his damp, angular buttocks. He squeezed my fingers twice, flirtatiously.

  ‘Good morning,’ he mumbled sleepily, and I was disconcerted by something new and faggoty in his voice. Or maybe it had always been there, a bat-squeak inaudible to the heterosexual ear, and it was only now that I could hear it. He turned towards me and smiled randily. That moment of open daylight intimacy alarmed me briefly; as if he knew that I needed to be converted once more, he pulled me closer, slithered down the bed and took me in his mouth, rolling my softness around his palate like an expert wine-taster. I stared ahead of me and found myse
lf gazing at the stack of foolscap writing pads on the desk where he had been writing the previous day. I counted twelve of them.

  ‘Have you finished?’

  He murmured something unintelligible into my crotch.

  ‘You don’t want to hurry it. So many novels lose themselves in the final quarter when the author is hurrying for the finishing line. I always think Greene has that problem.’

  He held my balls and gave them a gentle but slightly irritated twist. ‘Shut the fuck up, teach,’ he said, then began to work on me in earnest.

  I took a handful of his hair and pulled him off me, his lips making a comical sucking noise as they slipped off me. I knelt over him and gathered up his long, spidery legs as if we were engaged in an erotic wheelbarrow race. He looked up at me, smiling, more open and happy than I had ever seen. I laughed, at the absurdity of it all, at the release and freedom. I guided myself into him and made love to him, not with the savage, flailing need of last night, but slowly, contemplatively, teasing him by holding off as long as possible, almost as if he were a girl.

  Later, we lay in each other’s arms, a smell entirely unlike anything I have known after sex with a woman – a scent of pure, honest, unsullied desire – clinging to both of us.

  ‘Would you like to read my novel?’ he whispered.

  ‘Of course.’ I ran my fingers down his rib cage.

  He turned and touched my face. ‘Was this the plan?’ he asked. ‘Was it what this weekend was all about?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘To get your student in the sack?’

  ‘No.’ I shook my head, shocked by the implication. ‘I was as surprised as you were.’

  ‘You are?’

  ‘I’m not like that. I’ve never – I mean, I don’t … do this.’

  ‘Nor am I.’ He sat up and kissed me. ‘Nor was I.’