Sex & Genius

by Conrad Williams

  To Fiona

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  Also available by Conrad Williams

  Chapter One

  Bad luck came in threes. An unlucky person magnetised misfortune, became soft and sappy and attractive to body blows which were dealt in a cluster: kidney-jab, upper-cut, finishing rib-kick.

  He sat bleary and tired on an Italian train.

  They had stalked him in the station, a quick shuffle of bodies, a girl and a man, two others somewhere; he buckled into himself, keeping the wallet in the pit of his jacket and clutching his suitcase like crazy; but the mobile got swiped, along with his ticket, yanked from his trousers by flurrying hands.

  He was not surprised, and that was part of it. He was wearing a good suit and looking easy to pick off, foreign, not outwardly assured – not since that morning on the Gatwick train when his solicitor mugged him. A verbal assault, followed by a payment deadline (strong language, red faces); and now as he sat on the hard seats of the Circumvesuviana, his knees projecting beyond his Neapolitan neighbour's, his hands pressed flat on his suitcase, his heart grimly thudding, he knew what the third blow would be. The man he had come all this way to see would say no.

  'Your favourite author's a recluse. And a purist. I can't imagine he's ever owned a television set.' Hilldyard's elderly agent had been sceptical. 'If I mention the word documentary he'll have tummyache for a week, and that will be that.'

  'Snotty about television,' advised the Profile editor. 'He sent the Beeb guy packing like a fourth-form twit.'

  'Which he is.'

  'Yeah, but London Weekend got stuffed, too. Lord Crusty Shit' – he was referring to Hilldyard's agent – 'wouldn't let them near the old boy. He's seriously uninterested, Michael.'

  'I'll get him.'

  'That author is not a people person.'

  'I actually know something about his writing.'

  'I'll believe it when I see it.'

  'Unlike some people.'

  He had waited an age for the train to move. And then it moved silently, drawing into daylight under a thicket of power-lines in the direction of Portici, Torre Annunziata, Castellamare di Stabia, evocative place-names denoting a coastline of asphalt and concrete. The sky was overcast, Vesuvius somewhere close, lost behind vapour.

  The solicitor had mauled him; an extraordinary outburst. They stood in the buffet car after a chance encounter on the slow Gatwick train.

  'Are you real or just leeching off the system?'

  'I'm . . .'

  'You spend it on the lunches, the elegant scripts by bankable writers, but never a dime for your poor old brief.'

  'Can I explain?'

  'What are you? A fly-by-night?'

  'It's a short-term cashflow . . .'

  'Shove cashflow. I've heard cashflow till I'm blue in the face. I walk into Terry's or The Place I count as many cashflow fuck-ups as ponytails.'

  'Jack, please . . . I'm working on a documentary about James Hilldyard.'

  The solicitor shook his head. 'I don't want your pitch. I want ten grand.'

  'I'll pay.'

  'The Bloomsbury office, the intelligent slate, the Brains Trust dad with highbrow connections. One minute you're the renaissance of British broadcasting, the next you're a clotheshorse with no chequebook.'

  'Listen, will you! The fuckheads cancelled my series!'

  He was exhausted now. A long-haul weariness suffused his limbs and joints, the rhythm of the train inducing stupor. He was in no state to meet Hilldyard.

  He had not been so nervous since dating Christine. Everything depended on how they got on and the onus was so heavily on him to ask the right questions, set the right tone, be on the right kind of good form, just to be liked by the old man.

  His solicitor had been tough at first, moderately vexed, justifiably so. Michael owed him money. But then he became furious, because Michael, on his own admission, turned down a documentary series which the BBC offered him as an alternative to The Western Canon.

  'Why the fuck?' said Grossman.

  'Sex and Genius! You must be joking!'

  'You've got debts, liabilities!'

  'I left the BBC to stop making tabi-pop arts garbage aimed at the Café´ Rouge audience!'

  'Christ, Michael!'

  'I couldn't do it. It was a trashy idea.'

  He had the case behind his calves and a book on his lap. He gazed through the window of the train as though there was something he did not understand. If Hilldyard turned him down, he would go bankrupt and lose his house.

  For this situation he had only himself to blame.

  Seven novels, written over thirty years from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s; two short-story collections; three non-fiction volumes (essays, travel pieces, journalism): the corpus of work was not large, nor the novels long. But Hilldyard had won the Somerset Maugham and Booker Prizes, the Whitbread and Hennessy awards, and as if these were insufficient, a dozen other honours and fellowships, and innumerable nominations. It was an order of achievement that Michael tried to assimilate as he sat staring at the face in the paperback photo. In his suitcase he had a sheaf of reviews and articles, a critical bibliography; he had the novels themselves, jumbled in memory; he had scant information on the author's uneventful life, reported in the articles as leaping from birth in the West Country, to teaching at a prep school, to a spell with the British Council where he met his wife. (He had no children.) Michael's only inside knowledge, and the thing that gave him courage and the hope of success, was the fact of his own appreciation – he would even say veneration – an enduring asset, acquired in his twenties, when he had read everything the novelist had published with a kind of alarmed marvel. For Michael, Hilldyard was the Master, a contemporary genius. To meet him was more of a pilgrimage than a triumph of access. Maintaining one's cool as a television producer would be hard on a good day; and these days were not good days.

  The author's literary agent had vetted him with gusto.

  They had sat opposite each other on Louis Quinze chairs, a decanter between them, Michael petitioning at the Court of Versailles. Basil Curwen was a beady mid-century type, fastidious, crisply spoken.

  'I'd like to discuss the possibility of a documentary about James Hilldyard,' he had begun.

  'For whom would you make such a programme?'

  'Profile are interested.'

  'Ah . . . Profile.'

  'A seventy-five-minute special.'

  The agent exhaled cigarette smoke. 'Hasn't that strand become rather fatuous of late?'

  'Yes. This would be different.'

  Curwen smiled inauthentically. 'I think I would find that hard to believe.'

  'Probably. Arts programming is uneven these days. But I would persuade you.'

  His face muscles shifted in response to Michael's presumption. 'Would you, indeed?'
>
  'I know every novel he's written. I know his non-fiction backwards. I'm sure that Mr Hilldyard would be interested if I could just speak to him.'

  The agent was amazed. 'One doesn't just speak to him!'

  'Why not?'

  'Heavens! We are talking about a very great novelist.'

  He stared hard at Curwen, at the implied belittling of his status in the industry.

  'I make films about very great novelists.'

  'Lawrence Friedmann and Phil Barry have approached us. We have said no to them, and they are both well-known broadcasters.'

  Curwen was notoriously tricky. A doyen in his time, six years of lung-cancer had made him brittle, over-determined to assert his temporal power as an agent. Despite having cancer, he worked hard and smoked harder. He refused to be outlived by his clients.

  'I want to tackle Mr Hilldyard on his own territory.' Michael had fastened on to his train of thought. 'I want to talk to him about what concerns him most. Writing fiction. My aim, if I have an aim, is to give the viewer a sense of the intensity with which a great writer engages with his art form. I'm not chasing a story. I've no axe to grind. I want Mr Hilldyard to communicate the aesthetic, cognitive and moral possibilities of the novel as he sees them. I want to capture at source the thing that enthrals me when I read his prose. A sensibility. A vision of life. I want to know how he does it! What he goes through to produce a work of fiction. His seventy-fifth birthday is a perfect hook for the programme. We might not get another chance.'

  Curwen held his cigarette aloft, giving him a veiled look.

  On a fine day sea light glimmers on the coastline tower blocks. Capri floats on the horizon like a vast galleon. The autumn sun casts a nostalgic haze over the edifices of the shipping yard, suffusing cement walls with seaport luminosity and the glow of a glorious past. Today the horizon was indiscernible, the shoreline wreathed in cloud.

  As the train ran along the southern side of the Bay – under the mountains of the Sorrentine peninsula – he realised he was entering Hilldyard's world, his landscape of retreat. Michael gazed at the peaks above with their summit crosses vaunting Christ against Vesuvius. He glanced at his fellow passengers: girls with enormous eyes and eagle noses, men with tattoos and long eyelashes, a teenage Nero fatly hanging from a strap. He, in return, was noticed, but not watched. The events of the day had collapsed his aura. There was nothing for people to latch on to beyond the visible fact of his being tall, dark-haired and not badly dressed for a foreigner.

  Bankruptcy would be bitter. All the more so for bumping into Nick Adamson two weeks ago. He had spotted him by chance in a Soho media club. Nick was throwing a party in celebration of his thirty-fifth birthday, and The Place had let him have both floors and all bars. Non-invited members were turned around in the lobby and propelled on to the street. Michael, who was uninvited, stood at the threshold of the ground-floor bar, gazing at the sparkling crowd and champagne buckets, and saw his old college contemporary in a white jacket, straddling a chair-arm and donating fluorescent smiles to admiring females. The room was buzzing. A-type movie males elbowed around at cleavage height. Famous actors stood chatting to bedazzled film critics. Exquisite women were touchably close: Adamson's 'friends' – the talent aristocracy – drawn to his circle by the astronomic success of Castles in the Air, which budgeted at five and a half and grossed a quarter billion.

  Michael made his way over to him with a sinking heart. He had to say hello. The handshake with Adamson consecrated failure. Envy shot through him like a sudden sickness, something his maturity could neither refute nor shrug off. The gap between his own future and that of Adamson was irrecoverable now. Failure was not enough, he realised. One had to endure the success of one's peers.

  'I've heard the hard-luck story so often it makes me fart.' Grossman was in his face, seething with contempt. 'Go to pops, get the stash, pay the bill.'

  He shook his head miserably. He was thirty-six but felt like a twelve-year-old.

  'I get nothing from him.'

  'Except credibility, which you've squandered.'

  The solicitor was ridiculing him as a dilettante, a poseur.

  'I'll give you a month.'

  The two men stood facing each other.

  'If I don't have a good cheque four banking days before time, I'll smack a winder on your company.'

  His heart was bashing away in his chest. There were too many deadlines now.

  'Putting me into receivership won't pay your bill.'

  Grossman came up close, breath hot, eyes switching aggressively back and forth.

  'I'm not sacrificing my business to your artistic pretensions.' He stared harshly, seeing out the charge of contempt. 'Cheerio, Michael.'

  The train terminated at Sorrento. Already the light was failing, an inky dusk spreading from the eastern sky over the Bay. He transferred to a coach, and by the time the vehicle had completed its slow climb to the crest of the mountain, the southern side of the peninsula was in darkness. The coach descended on to the windy corniche that ran above the sea, and all he saw in the gloom was the road's parapet spooling out in the headlights. It shot onwards, cut sideways, squiggled off into the pit of a cove where already the remote eyes of a lorry could be seen pursuing their slow convergence with the headlong coach; and as his gaze fastened on the low shelf stripping away into black, here cracked, here obliterated into a gaping tooth-hole by some doomed car, it was as if consciousness only existed within the realm of the headlights, and beyond that realm there was nothing.

  In Positano he took directions and made his way down the Viale. The town hung about him, lights twinkling at different elevations, roofs scattered in the ravine below. He was bewildered by the topography of a place that gave on one side to the night sky and invisible sea, on the other to the indefinite mass of the mountain.

  Blackness hung on the veranda of his hotel. He crossed to the entrance and went in. The Signora, plump and bespectacled with beehive hair and dangly earrings, acknowledged him impassively. After the filling in of a form and the submitting of a passport he was led to his room. She noisily unlocked the door. There was a low bed, side mats and rug; a picture per wall. The shutters were fastened behind brown curtains. It was a basic room, adequate for sleep. He thanked her and began to unpack.

  He lifted out his laptop, printer and stationery and put them on a desk. He placed a sheaf of TV trade magazines on the chest of drawers. Christine's photo he took from its nest among shirts and socks and set on the bedside table. After hanging his trousers and taking a pee he sat down at the desk and fiddled with an adapter for the laptop. Soon the screen was aglow and he was typing in questions for his meeting with the author.

  Later, he sat on the bed. He held a collection of Hilldyard's essays and criticism. The volume was broken-spined and frail, maimed by frequent use. He had recalled a particular passage. His eyes skated over the text, scanning page by page, and suddenly it was there, right by his thumb, and he found himself dog-earing the corner and marking the margin with a pen; and before long he was absorbed, his fingers delicately containing the will of the paperback to separate; and as interest became involvement, and involvement restored him to himself, he barely noticed the damp air, or the noise of a cistern in a neighbour's bathroom.

  He lay on the bed, eyes ringed with tiredness. He was fading now, feeling drowsy, numb, and the thoughts that passed through his mind were less worrying than before. And as he lay, head on the pillow, gazing at the blank whiteness of the wall, he remembered what Curwen had told him.

  According to the agent, James Hilldyard had turned down three-quarters of a million for film rights to a novel.

  'He had second thoughts about the book, which of course is superb, and probably will be his last.'

  'Three-quarters of a million?'

  'And Shane Hammond. Who wanted to star and direct.' Curwen coughed, his eyes were watery.

  'This is something new?'

  'His first novel in fifteen years. It'll never see the li
ght of day.'

  He had been fascinated to be privy to such information; and now, as sleep pulled at his eyelids, he allowed himself a smile. Hilldyard had rebuffed Hollywood; and Michael had disdained Sex and Genius. Renunciation connected them, and appropriately so. If in his twenties he had not read Hilldyard he might never have realised why in his thirties he should turn down Sex and Genius. Great writers fortified one against triviality, and it was good to know that Hilldyard was still worthy of Michael's high principles. Three-quarters of a million pounds had not broken his iron hold on perfection.

  * * *

  I would advise people to write fiction; not necessarily for publication, far less as a living; but as a means to apprehend their lives. There is no better way to possess life than to recreate it through the writing of a novel . . .

  It was four in the morning. He held the paperback in his right hand.

  A great novel simultaneously illustrates the human condition and the possibility of perceiving it. However awesome the achievement, however excrutiating the sense of a genius beyond one's own, one is always inspired. An alchemy has occurred, an interaction of subject and structure that makes everything work, beyond craft, beyond calculation. Someone has played with narrative and the form has suddenly engaged memory, insight, passionate sympathy. Form is an instrument of thought and the form of the novel liberates intelligence, and in certain combinations, genius.

  In a great writer, Michael realised, there was a Christ-like quality. To render the human condition a writer must not only imagine but also endure that condition. He must feel in imagination as people feel in life, and thus restore to the reader the reader's own life, aesthetically crystallised. Hilldyard, it would seem, had suffered Michael's condition. His work encompassed and surpassed Michael's specific intelligence, his particular sensibility. And in the months after Christine's death Hilldyard's were the only novels that Michael could read. The writing reassured him. It was comforting to be in the company of a sophisticated but humane intelligence, of a writer whose need to describe and discriminate and view the human scene with such care reinforced life. His prose was restorative; and for that Michael would always be grateful.