by Nick Hornby
So away Jennie Erdal goes, and writes a novel, and the flamboyant publisher publishes it, and it gets respectful reviews – partly because the flamboyant publisher is a respected figure, and partly, one suspects, because Erdal can clearly write. And, rather than breathe a huge sigh of relief, he decides to ‘write’ another, although this one turns out to have a higher, tighter concept than the first: he wants it to be about two women, cousins born on the same day, who are so close that when one achieves orgasm, so does the other. Pretty good, you have to admit, and as Erdal seems, inexplicably, to have ignored the idea, it’s still going begging.
Ghosting is a strange and rather wonderful book, and it makes you think about all sorts of things connected with writing and the notion of authorship. The truth is, however, that it’s old news. Almost nobody writes their own books these days; indeed, to do so is seen as a mark of failure in literary circles. Of course, the young have no choice, and there are, apparently, a few renegades who insist on churning out word after word: the word on the literary street is that Michael Chabon wrote every word of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, for example, presumably out of some misguided and outdated notion of honesty. But the rest of us don’t really bother. I have always used an old lady called Violet, who lives in a cottage in Cornwall, in the far west of England, and who is an absolute treasure. She’s getting better, too.
For some reason, I found myself up a ladder in Strand Books in NYC a couple of months ago, looking to see whether they had any copies of old William Cooper novels. I know that Philip Larkin mentions him in his letters, but there may have been another nudge from somewhere, too. Whatever the motivation, I was led as if by magic to a beautiful 1961 Scribner hardback which cost me six dollars, and which contained Cooper’s first and third novels, Scenes from Provincial Life and Scenes from Married Life, published in the US as Scenes from Life.
I’d read them both before, twenty or more years ago, and I remembered them as being particularly important to me, although I wouldn’t have been able to articulate why. Now I can see it: Joe Lunn, the hero of these books (and Cooper’s thinly disguised alter ego), is, in the first book at least, a schoolteacher who has ambitions to make his living from writing, and that’s exactly the situation I found myself in when my sister gave me the books as a Christmas present in what must have been ’82 or’83, seeing as those were the only years I was in full-time gainful employment in a school. I don’t think I managed to see the connection at the time. Really. I thought I’d been enjoying them for other reasons (they are incredibly enjoyable books). I thought I should own up to that, just to help you gauge the soundness of all the other literary judgements I make on these pages.
The reason that Scenes from Metropolitan Life, the second novel in the sequence, isn’t included in the edition I bought is that it wasn’t published until 1982, even though it was written in the 1950s; Cooper’s work was so autobiographical that he was threatened with legal action by the real-life version of the young woman who is Joe’s girlfriend in the first book and his mistress in the second. (Is that right? The thing is, she gets married in between the two, although he doesn’t. Can you have a mistress if you’re not married? Can you be a mistress if your lover isn’t married? Is there a useful handbook you can look these things up in?) Publication of Scenes from Metropolitan Life was only possible after her death, and in the meantime Cooper’s career had lost all the momentum it built up after the success of the first novel. All his books are out of print now.
Scenes from Provincial Life is a lovely novel, sweet-natured, and surprisingly frank about sexual relationships, considering the book is set in 1939: Joe has a weekend cottage which he shares with a friend, and where a lot of the book is set. Joe sleeps with Myrtle, the litigious girlfriend, there; Joe’s friend Tom uses it for trysts with his seventeen-year-old boyfriend Steve. See what I mean? Who knew anyone had sex in 1939, in a provincial town? Well, we all did, I suppose, but in Larkin’s words, ‘sexual intercourse began / in 1963’ – or at least, twentieth-century mainstream British artistic representations of it did – so it’s weird to read what is effectively a Kingsley Amis–style comedy of sexual manners which also talks about Chamberlain at Munich.
If Scenes from Metropolitan Life is a little less successful, it’s partly because all the characters are a little older, and a little sadder, and they take their jobs more seriously, and those jobs are a little more dull: Joe is a civil servant in the second book. He’s still trying to make up his mind whether to marry Myrtle, but Myrtle’s married already, to someone stationed in Palestine, and Cooper’s insouciance doesn’t really seem to take the sadness of any of that on board. (My pristine secondhand copy came from my Amazon Marketplace seller with Kingsley Amis’s 1982 Sunday Times review tucked neatly into the dust jacket, by the way. Kingsley loved the first one but gave the second a reluctant thumbs-down.) I’ve just started the third, and Joe’s nearly forty, still single, and still looking, and you’re beginning to suspect that there might actually be something wrong with him that he’s not owning up to. It’s hard, trying to be funny about getting older. Scenes from Provincial Life can afford to be cute and fresh because the characters have so little at stake; but then we grow older, more tired, more cynical, more worried; and then we die. And where’s the joke in that? Oh. Ha. I’ve just seen it. It’s pretty good.
Happy March, dear Believer readers. I hope you have a fantastic ten months.
A selection from
GHOSTING
by JENNIE ERDAL
It is 1994 and we are off to France once again. This time we are going there to write a novel. The publication of several nonfiction books has brought Tiger a sense of fulfilment, but there has been no lasting contentment. As the ancients knew and understood, pleasure is transient; it comes, it is savoured, and it goes. Descartes thought that the secret of happiness was to be satisfied with what you know you can have, and not to hanker after something you can’t have. But Tiger differs from both the ancients and Descartes in his belief that almost anything is attainable provided you pay for it, and that by setting the sights high the chances of pleasure being permanent are correspondingly high.
And so, from one moment to the next, anything can happen. A moment ago a sixth volume of interviews was published, attended by a good deal of media interest, favourable reviews, and another round of newspaper profiles. In the Daily Telegraph Allan Massie described Tiger as ‘masterly and sympathetic, the most self-effacing of interviewers and yet able to speak as an equal’. Robert Kee called him ‘a magician interviewer of the highest order’. William Trevor wrote:‘Making real people real at second hand isn’t as easy as it seems… it’s the subtlety of interrogation that ensures these portraits emerge.’Tiger purred with pleasure. Everything was well in the world. The next moment we are writing a novel and the landscape has changed. Sic transit Gloria mundi.
Tiger is convinced that the way ahead ‘for us’ lies in a different sort of publication. Interviews, newspaper articles, book reviews are all very well, but the real test is the novel. He lowers his voice at this point, enunciating each word slowly, a sure sign of scarcely being able to contain his excitement, elongating the word real to a disturbing length. He is captivated by the idea. This is not a whim. I know the difference between a whim and a serious proposition. This is a serious proposition. He will not be dissuaded. The tiger is not for turning. I feel the familiar panic pitching its tent somewhere in my lower abdomen.
‘We need to evolve,’ he says.
I do not demur.
How to write a novel? How to write someone else’s novel? These two questions seem absolutely central. I wonder how I have arrived at this point without actually meaning to.
‘What sort of novel are we thinking about?’ I ask.
We are in the British Airways Executive Lounge at London Gatwick airport en route to France. The writing will be done in France. According to Tiger, France is the best place in the world to create a work of literature. Evidently w
e will have everything we need: the best food, the finest wine, a high-tech music system, a studio to work in, the fresh Dordogne air.
‘We are thinking about a beautiful novel, very beautiful,’he says, and he looks somewhere into the middle distance, smiling rapturously, already transported by the sheer imagined beauty of it.‘And it will have a beautiful cover. We will make sure of that.’ He taps out the last six words on the table.
‘But what genre are we talking about? Are we thinking of a romantic novel? A thriller? (These conversations are always conducted in the first person plural. The idiosyncratic use of pronouns is part of the charade and has become second nature.)
‘It will be thrilling, oh yes. And also romantic. Very romantic. Oh, yes.’
‘So, a love story then?’
‘But of course! It has to be a love story. People associate me with love. I am famous for love. Isn’t it?’
In certain circumstances, the plural pronoun would switch abruptly to the singular, from we to I, from us to me. There is always a compelling reason for the shift. In this instance, the snag is that people do not associate me with love. Unlike Tiger, I am not famous for love.
There is a long pause. The matter might have ended there, but for my need to establish the broad nature of the project. I have to ask some more. Tiger is almost certainly concentrating on the finished product, beautifully bound and wrapped in a seductive dust-jacket. My only concern is how the finished product will be arrived at.
‘What sort of love story do we have in mind?’ I ask, as if we are discussing wallpaper or home furnishings and he has to pick one from a limited range. ‘Is the love requited or unrequited?’
‘Definitely requited. Oh yes, very requited.’
‘And who are the characters?’
Even by our standards this is becoming an odd exchange.
‘Sweetie,’ he says, the tone long-suffering, humouring an imbecile. He takes hold of my hand in a kindness-to-dumb-animals sort of way.‘It has to be the love between a man and a woman. Do you think I could write about poofters? No, it has to be a man and a woman – a beautiful woman and very sexy. There will be lots of sex, but very distinguished. We will do the sex beautifully. Isn’t it?’
‘Long? Short?’ I’m feeling desperate now.
He strokes his chin, weighing up the possibilities.
‘Not too long, not too short.’
‘And do we have a story line? Do we have any idea of what it is about?’
‘Of course, beloved! I have thought of everything.’ He squeals the last word in a spasm of exuberance. ‘Let me tell you the idea. It is very simple. There is a man… he is like me somewhat… he is married… he falls in love with a woman… there is a huge passion… and then… well, we will see what happens after that, isn’t it?’
There is another pause while I weigh things up. Then:
‘Does he tell his wife? About the huge passion, I mean.’
‘Darling, are you mad?’Tiger points a finger to his temple and screws it from side to side.‘Why would he tell her? Why would he hurt her?’
APRIL 2006
BOOKS BOUGHT:
Eustace and Hilda – L. P. Hartley
Moondust – Andrew Smith
Darkness Falls from the Air – Nigel Balchin
1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare – James Shapiro
BOOKS READ:
The Dirt – Mötley Crüe
The Shrimp and the Anemone – L. P. Hartley
The Poet – Michael Connelly
Then We Came to the End – Joshua Ferris
‘Character is fate.’ Discuss with reference to Eustace Cherrington in The Shrimp and the Anemone and Nikki Sixx in The Dirt.
(It occurred to me that with the exam season coming up, younger readers might actually prefer this format for the column. I don’t know how many of you are studying L. P. Hartley’s The Shrimp and the Anemone in conjunction with The Dirt – probably not many. But even if it’s only a couple of hundred, I’ll feel as though I’ve provided some kind of public service. Please feel free to lift as much of the following as you need.)
In many ways, Eustace Cherrington – the younger half of the brother-sister combo in Hartley’s Eustace and Hilda trilogy – and Nikki Sixx, the Crüe’s bass player, are very different people. Eustace is a young boy, and Nikki Sixx is a grown man; Eustace is English, middle-class and fictional, and Nikki Sixx is working-class, American and (according to the internet at least) a real person. The Shrimp and the Anemone is a very beautiful novel, full of delicate people and filigree observation, whereas The Dirt is possibly the ugliest book ever written. And yet Eustace and Nikki Sixx both, each in their own ways, somehow manage to disprove Heraclitus’s maxim – or at any rate, they demand its modification. Both Hartley’s novel and the Crüe bio remind us it’s not character but constitution that determines our destinies. Eustace is, let’s face it, a weed and a wuss. He’s got a weak heart, so he can’t go out much, and when he eventually steels himself to take part in a paper chase with the delectable but destructive Nancy, he collapses with exhaustion and takes to his sickbed for months. Nikki Sixx, however, is made of sterner stuff. When he ODs on heroin in LA and nearly dies – a journalist phones one of his bandmates for an obituary – what does he do? He gets home, pulls a lump of heroin out of the medicine cabinet, and ODs again. Thus we can see that Nikki Sixx and Eustace Cherrington live the lives that their bodies allow them to live. Nothing really matters, apart from this. Why do some of us read a lot of books and watch a lot of TV instead of play in Mötley Crüe? Because we haven’t got the stomachs for it. It’s as simple as that.
It was a mistake, reading The Dirt straight after The Shrimp and the Anemone. (Is it just a coincidence, by the way, that whole shrimp/anemone/squid/whale combo? Because even though Hartley’s sea creatures are little ones, unlike writer-director Noah Baumbach’s monsters, they serve pretty much the same metaphorical function: the novel opens with a gruesome and symbolic battle to the death. Anyway, where’s the meat? Can anyone think of a way to get a little artistic surf’n’turf action going?) The Dirt shat and puked and pissed all over the memory of poor Eustace’s defenceless introspection – indeed, so grotesque are the characters and narrative events described in the Mötley Crüe book that it’s very difficult to see any ideal circumstance in which to read it. I certainly recommend not reading anything for a month before, because the strong flavours of Nikki, Tommy Lee and the other two will overwhelm pretty much any other literary delicacy you may have consumed; and you probably won’t want to read any fiction for a month afterwards because it will be hard to see the point. There are moments in The Dirt that render any attempts to explain the intricate workings of the human heart redundant, because there are no intricate workings of the human heart, clearly. There are only naked groupies, and endless combinations of class-A drugs, and booze, and covers of ‘Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room’. And what have you got to say about all that, Anita Brookner? No. I thought not. There is one moment in The Dirt so disturbingly repellent that it haunts me still, but I’m unsure whether to quote it or not, for obvious reasons. What I think I’ll do is reproduce the offending line in tiny writing, and if you want to read it, you’ll have to go and fetch a magnifying glass – that way, you have participated in your own corruption. I advise you not to bother. This, then, from the early days: bother. This, then, from the early days:
We’d scrounge up enough money to buy an egg burrito from Noggles. Then we’d bite the end off and stick our dicks into the warm meat to cover up the smell of pussy, so that our girlfriends didn’t know we were fucking anything stupid or drunk enough to get into Tommy’s van.
I’m afraid I have various questions about this. In America, are showers not cheaper than egg burritos? Does Noggles itself (we don’t even have the establishment here in England, let alone the Noggles-associated behaviour) not have a washroom? And didn’t the girlfriends ever wonder… actually, forget it. We’ve gone far enough. It could be
, of course, that this episode is a fabrication, but without wishing to add to the contemporary furore about the falsification of real lives, I’d argue that this is of a whole new order: anyone depraved enough to imagine this is certainly depraved enough to do it.
So why read it at all? Well, I read it because my friend Erin gave it to me for Christmas, and she had taken quite a lot of trouble to track down a nice hardback copy. Why Erin thought this was an appropriate gift with which to commemorate the birth of our Lord I’m not sure; why she thought that it was an appropriate gift for me is even less clear and somewhat more troubling. Certain passages, it is true, were uncannily reminiscent of certain nights on my last book tour, especially the Midwest readings. I had hoped that what went on there was a secret between me and the women whose names began with the letters A through E (so many broken-hearted Felicitys!) at the signings in question, but clearly not.
And weirdly, The Dirt isn’t a bad book. For a start, it’s definitive, if you’re looking for the definitive book on vile, abusive, misogynistic behaviour: if there are any worse stories than this in rock and roll, they aren’t worth telling, because the human mind would not be capable of comprehending them without the aid of expert gynaecological and pharmaceutical assistance. It’s very nicely put together, too. The Dirt is an oral biography in the tradition of Please Kill Me, and Neil Strauss, the Studs Terkel of hair metal, has a good ear for the band’s self-delusions, idiocies and fuck-ups. Strauss, one suspects, has class. (Wilkie Collins provides the book’s epigraph, for example, and I’m guessing that this wasn’t Tommy Lee’s idea.) ‘I decided to have the name of the album, Till Death Do Us Part, carved into my arm,’ recalls the hapless John Corabi, who replaced singer Vince Neil for one unsuccessful album. ‘Soon afterward they changed the name of the album to just Mötley Crüe.’ Unexpectedly, The Dirt contains real pain, too. None of these characters have childhoods that one might envy, and their adult lives seem every bit as bleak and as joyless – especially if you are cursed with a constitution that prevents anything more than an occasional night in the Bank of Friendship.
