Kill Your Darlings

by Terence Blacker

  Sensing parental guilt, perhaps some sort of need for absolution, I pointed out that he had reached university.

  ‘Three Counties University,’ said Bob. ‘A tarted-up poly. They had courses like Leisure Studies and Tourism.’

  Mrs Gibson stirred nervously beside him. ‘We were disappointed but we didn’t let on. We didn’t want to undermine him.’

  ‘We left that to him.’ A humourless smile crossed Bob Gibson’s face, revealing a row of even white teeth.

  ‘He was a depressive,’ his wife said suddenly. ‘During his teens, we tried everything. Therapy. Pills. There was even talk of some kind of shock treatment. We thought it was teenage blues. But somehow we always knew it was more serious than that.’

  ‘Had he ever –?’ I winced, unwilling to articulate the hated word. ‘I mean, was this the first attempt?’

  Bob nodded. ‘Whatever he tried, he did to the best of his ability. Even that.’

  ‘All he wanted to do was write.’ Sally Gibson was clearly anxious to change the subject. ‘That was why he dropped out of Media Studies. We explained that he had the rest of his life for that sort of thing, a degree would give him options – he’d have a breathing space in which to decide what to do with his life, but no, he said, it would give him nothing. He didn’t want a career, a structure to his life. When I told him he needed some kind of qualification before he was too old, he said you didn’t need a certificate to be eligible to write well.’

  ‘Age is just a number,’ said Bob Gibson softly. ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s just a number, Dad.’

  ‘We did encourage him with his writing. We bought him a computer – a laptop. He kept it here and worked on it over the weekends. He said it would only get nicked in London.’

  ‘Tap tap tap.’ Bob sighed. ‘Great bloody company he was.’

  ‘He was a writer,’ I said kindly, as my mind took in this surprising and somewhat alarming item of news. ‘It’s what we do.’

  There was another silence of respect for Mr and Mrs Gibson’s tap-tap-tapping writer son.

  ‘As you know, one of the reasons I wanted to meet you was to discuss my tribute to Peter.’

  Bob Gibson looked at me sharply. ‘Your tribute?’

  ‘The Institute’s tribute. But I would put it together. I feel I owe it to Peter.’ I smiled, as if remembering their son. ‘He was such a very promising writer that I wanted to produce a little booklet – nothing lavish – containing some of his best work. Something I know his fellow students would like to keep and so would I.’

  ‘I suppose that would be nice.’ Mrs Gibson glanced at her husband who appeared to have drifted off. She squeezed his hand with an intimacy which I was beginning to find grating in a couple of their age. ‘Don’t you think, Bob?’

  ‘It would be all right, I suppose,’ Mr Gibson muttered.

  ‘I’d be very happy to clear material with you before it’s included.’

  ‘And the Institute would pay?’ he asked.

  ‘If they didn’t, I would.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you, Mr Keays.’

  ‘Gregory, please.’ Briefly lost in reminiscence, I pulled myself together. ‘Would he have printed out the material he wrote on the computer?’

  Both parents looked surprised. ‘No,’ said Bob. ‘I always assumed they were just notes.’

  ‘Sometimes a writer’s notes can contain his best work. If I could just borrow the laptop –’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Sally Gibson spoke to me but gazed at her husband. ‘It feels like an invasion.’

  I allowed a couple of beats before making my move.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said decisively. ‘Maybe the idea of publication itself is an invasion. Some writers believe that merely to be read is a compromise of their … their soul, if you like. Perhaps I should drop the idea of a tribute volume altogether.’

  Bob Gibson twitched into life. ‘Compromise their soul? He wasn’t that daft, Peter. Of course he wanted readers.’

  I allowed the inconsistency of their position to sink in. ‘I’d only borrow it for a week or so.’

  Sally Gibson stood up. ‘I’ll fetch it for you,’ she said.

  When she returned, bearing a small grey laptop, she remained standing. Clearly our meeting was over. With promises to be in touch soon with details of Peter’s memorial volume, I was soon on my way.

  * * *

  There had been something about Meadowfield that gave me the creeps. Its neatness, its secrets, its smug sense of unchallenged domestic security. The smell of normal family life in the Gibson household seemed to cling to my clothes, reminding me uncomfortably of the days when I used to collect Dougie from birthday parties. In the houses of his friends, I had always been aware of the warmth and noise and the backchat of adults and children, a sense of connection with normal, everyday life which was somehow lacking at home. I found myself wondering now how it was that the Gibsons, with their oddball son, managed to achieve that ease and intimacy while Marigold and I, with our oddball son, had merely conjured up a chilly wasteland of hostility and non-communication. I took small, heartless comfort in the fact that, for all their smug family happiness, the folk from Meadowfield had produced a young suicide while we, for all our many failings, were merely having to deal with normal adolescent dysfunction.

  I was driving towards Wolverhampton, Peter’s laptop on the seat beside me. I pulled into a lay-by and switched it on. There were, I was relieved to see, only two documents: one consisting of notes, the other letters to one Mary Kydd, who seemed to be a student at Keele. I reached into the pocket of the case. There were three letters, still in their envelopes, addressed in a girlish hand to Peter at his home. I glanced through the letters – gossipy accounts of student life with occasional questions about Peter’s writing. In the third envelope, I found a photograph: a dark, slightly plump young girl stood on the steps of a redbrick building.

  Mary Kydd. Not a girlfriend, I judged, but a friend, maybe even a fellow writer.

  * * *

  Top Five Health Tips from the Great Writers

  1. John Keats advised, ‘Whenever I feel myself growing vapourish, I rouse myself, wash and put on a clean shirt brush my hair and clothes, tie my shoestrings neatly and in fact adonize as if I were going out – then all clean and comfortable I sit down to write.’

  2. Frederick Nietzsche believed that writing brought its own health. ‘When my creative energy flowed most freely, my muscular activity was always greatest,’ he wrote. ‘I might often have been seen dancing; I used to walk through the hills for seven or eight hours on end without a hint of fatigue. I slept well, laughed a good deal – I was perfectly vigorous and patient.’

  3. T. S. Eliot could only write when anaemic.

  4. A. E. Housman needed to be ‘rather out of health’ to work at his best.

  5. Georges Simenon would insist on a full medical before he started writing a novel. If he was interrupted by ill health, he abandoned the novel.

  * * *

  25

  As a creative artist, one is confronted by a fundamental, practical dilemma. Your life, the backdrop to your work: will it be a teeming, ever-changing, turbulent carnival of movement, drama and heartache, the colourful mix of which will seep into your writing, so that rivals will not only want to write like you but will long to be like you? Will you move around the world, pounding the streets of Hanoi, Budapest and Quito, the invisible outsider, alert to adventure, a spy, a buccaneer, a visitor of brothels, engaging fleetingly and regretfully with exotic lovers unable to cure you of your rambling cowboy writer ways? Or perhaps the adventure will be a more intimate one, a riotous progress in and out of bedrooms, an assault course of love and infidelity, of ecstasy and pain, bewildered children scattered behind you like broken, discarded toys, the garish confusion of your life contrasting intriguingly with the neatly paginated order of your writing and incidentally providing perfect material for wary but intrigued interviewers and profile-writers.

  This,
the ramblers’ course, is de rigueur among the new generation. Contemplation, the book-lined study, is out. Tears, intemperance, drugs, emotional hooliganism of one kind or another are touted in the public prints as if they were guarantees of artistic authenticity. He kicked in the door of his publisher; she left her husband after six weeks of marriage; they must be serious writers, talent and emotional incontinence being but different sides of the same coin.

  Then there are the stickers, the stayers, those who have followed the Flaubertian dictum that all the colours and dimensions in a writer’s life should be saved for his work: a house, a desk, regular meals, a ‘dull life, so calm and flat’ whose very lack of colour brings a pent-up vibrancy to the page.

  Each path contains a trap. By his nature, the rambler is self-destructive. The very stimulants which propel the early work will, over time, fry the brain cells. The life may become more important than the work. For the sticker, the peril is more insidious. Healthy, hard-working, punctilious and dutiful, he might suddenly find that the dreariness of his daily existence has seeped into his work, that there is nothing to fill the page but a stale, fiddling introversion.

  And, over both the rambler and sticker, there hangs one terrifying, unavoidable question: what happens to the novelist who either devotes himself to screwing up his life, to boozing, cheating, and doing damage or, taking the alternative route, who locks himself away, cultivating dullness, making words his only pleasure in an unpleasured world – what happens if he does all this and, at the end of it all, the words are crap? Too late he will discover that he has taken the wrong road, that, however much and for however many years he had rambled or stuck, he might just as well have lived the blameless, contented life of a civilian. After all the effort and sacrifice to himself and others, he has achieved nothing of literary worth.

  I shall be frank. There have been times when I have wondered whether, by taking the sticker’s path – dutiful father, supportive husband, member of the tennis club, to all appearances as dull a suburbanite as you would ever dread to meet – I had not wilfully starved myself of material. Every week I would read in the newspapers of my peers, blundering onwards, drugged, lustful, gloriously incapable of living the grown-up life of a citizen: far from disqualifying them from the ranks of the serious, their crazed egotism and rampant immaturity were widely perceived as a sort of artistic qualification. Not only were they having a better time than me, they were building their public reputations, garnering a rich harvest of raw experience.

  What did I have? The page. The screen. The study. The home, the family. Before, in a rare moment of self-centredness, I ejected my son from his loft, I had worked where he now slept in a small, dark room but a thin wall away from the bathroom. Often (in this at least my family were regular and healthy), I would find myself writing fiction to the accompaniment of bowel music from the adjoining room. With every dribble and grunt and fart and splash, with every rumble of the toilet roll and watery explosion from the cistern, I would become angrier and less able to write. It was as if my family’s easy evacuations were mocking the ever-increasing agony of my own artistic blocage. In my desperation to write something – anything – I included in Adultery in Hampstead a climactic turd-centred comic set-piece in the manner of early Kingsley Amis or Anthony Burgess. It may seem ludicrous but today I see there was a sort of integrity to the way that I transformed the most banal of domestic occurrences into material for fiction. McEwan had murder, Rushdie had the birth of India, Martin had eighties greed; I had my family’s daily dump.

  At my lowest point, it even occurred to me that, since Forever Young, a historical novel in which, as even my harshest critics conceded, I had attempted to address an entire society,* my writerly horizons had, with every uncompleted work, contracted daily: from the world at large, to a particular social group, to the small field representing my own domestic experience, to the page or the screen on which I was writing. Now, researching The Book of Literary Lists, I was that pitiably limited creature, a writer writing about writing. What next? A writer writing about a writer writing? The sheer futility of the enterprise assailed me every morning when I sat down at my desk.

  Now all that was past. There had been something about the events in that Gloucester hotel, followed by the death of Peter Gibson and my collaborative work on terpsichore 4:2 that shifted me, definitively and for ever, away from the ranks of the home boys, the stickers. Suddenly the demands of my wife and son which for years had distracted me from my work seemed distant and, heartless as it may seem, less significant than the writerly events occurring within and around my novel. I became a rambler.

  The notes on Peter’s computer were frankly disappointing. Of course, even the great writers will indulge in gibberish in their private notes or prose workouts, but these observations – banal events from a dusty, sexless private life, freighted with absurd, mythic significance – exposed the eggshell fragility of his undoubted artistic promise. I managed to quarry a few incidents from his accounts of childhood with a view to deploying them as moments of colour to the early chapters of terpsichore 4:2, then edited a few of the less abject efforts into a first draft of his memorial volume, which I had decided to entitle The Marvellous Boy: Peter Gibson 1976–1998.

  Some might think it was a small betrayal to have included embarrassingly slight jottings in the tribute to go out under Peter’s name while his more serious work was to be found in my own novel, but somehow these notes seemed more appropriately personal, more genuinely Peter, than the material which, as I worked over it hour after hour, was feeling less and less like a joint project and increasingly like the flowering of my own talent after a long period of hibernation.

  Yet, of course, the creative process is always open to misinterpretation. What I saw as a cross-generational fusion between master and pupil – a harvesting, if you like, of seeds of learning I had planted within Peter, others might regard as little short of plagiarism. At the best of times, the line between writing and editing is blurred and only those versed in the history of literary collaboration – Beaumont and Fletcher, Conrad and Ford, Eliot and Pound, would truly understand that my transcribing raw material from handwritten form on to my computer was as true an act of creation as the more traditional method of writing.

  In order to forestall a sterile, distracting debate about the ‘integrity’ of the text, I elected not to make the original draft notes available to prying eyes, brushing the footprints behind me as I made my long journey by the simple, if brutal, expedient of destroying the manuscript when I had finished with it.

  Every day, when I took my daily walk towards Acton, Chiswick or Bishop’s Park, a few pages of Peter’s handwritten work would be in my pocket. Every day, they would be left in one of the many recycling bins which the local councils made available to citizens. Every day, I returned, purged of debt to my former pupil. Every day, in a very real sense, the work became more mine and less his.

  Another confession. There were times, during the days after my return from Meadowfield, when I found myself examining my late student’s notes for information of a private, non-literary nature. The girl Mary Kydd, it seemed clear, was more a literary confidante than a lover: references to her in Peter’s carnets were invariably in the context of something he had read which he planned to show her.

  My response to this relationship was interestingly confused. Although, at heart, I wished Peter to be like me, a heterosexual male who, at a moment of supreme emotional and creative vulnerability, had sought comfort or understanding or something in the arms of a man, I was aware of the faintest spasm of jealousy within me.

  What were Peter’s desires when he was writing his novel? Did he yearn for this Mary Kydd person? Novelists caught up in creative fervour do not, my research for Literary Lists suggested, seek out erotic relief or, if they do, it tends to be of the most fleeting, emotionally disengaged kind. What then of those who were writing notes for a novel?

  I began to wonder about Mary, and how much she knew abo
ut my former lover.

  * * *

  The Writer Speaks of … Self-love

  I think most artists find that when they’re writing something, they become sexually excited. But it would be a waste of time to engage in a full-dress – or undress – sexual act with somebody at that moment. So they often go into the bathroom to masturbate when they write. Our sexual energy has been aroused, now we come, now we’re able to concentrate on the other aspect of this energy, which is the creative aspect.

  Anthony Burgess

  No less than the great Flaubert used to pull his pollywogger right at his desk, with insouciant aplomb, wipe the viscous semen on his velveteen smoking jacket, and go blithely and resolutely on with his masterpiece about the sappily romantic Emma.

  Frederick Exley

  I cannot write any kind of story unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire.

  Tennessee Williams

  One can no more think of making fiction without onanism, or selfishness (ask our wives), than of the sea without waves.

  John Fowles

  I have never successfully masturbated to Updike’s writing, though I have to certain remembered scenes in Iris Murdoch; but someone I know says that she achieved a number of quality orgasms from Couples when she first read it at age thirteen.

  Nicholson Baker

  How do I like to write? With a soft pencil and a hard dick – not the other way round.

  Hanif Kureishi

  * * *

  26

  Four days after my visit to Bob and Sally in Meadowfield, I made a call to Brian McWilliam and requested a meeting. He behaved as if he had been expecting my call. We agreed to meet at a pub called the Queen Bess near Shepherd’s Bush Green. The next evening, I rambled east once more.

  Although I was in a direct, cut-to-the-chase frame of mind, I took the scenic route, making my way down the streets with their bullying, confident imperial names (Adelaide Grove, Bloemfontein Road, Kaffirbash Crescent), between the blocks of flats which, like bad giant imitations of prisons, had outside walkways where young mothers stood, smoking and talking, the air humming with the discordant electronic clamour of TV and music, trash American movies and jungle beat. Occasionally, raised voices, a crash of crockery, the universal anthem of domestic pain cut the evening air before subsiding into angry, hopeless mutters. Between the buildings, small boys kicked a football to and fro, bored, uncompetitive, seemingly mesmerized by the smack of slack, scuffed leather on tarmac and brick. The newspapers called this area ‘Murder Mile’ but somehow the Shepherd’s Bush mortality rate, while being astonishingly high, hardly registered on the consciousness of those outside the small, self-harming circle in which it took place. These were dealers, drug dukes enacting their own little bloody border disputes. There was something almost clean about death in Murder Mile: a club, early hours of the morning, bang, a bullet to the head, maybe two heads, maybe three. No messy woundings. Life or death. Civilians excluded.